(no subject)

Today I got down to the bread and butter of my new job - calling up records of causes of death on the PC screen and entering the corresponding codes in boxes alongside them. Of course, they were all dummy data; I'm to be a trainee for a few months before I'm let loose on the real thing. Simon showed me what to do for the first few, look up the code in the world directory of diseases and medical conditions then type it in the box and hit Next, then left me to it when he saw I'd got the hang of it. The first batch was pretty straightforward, and called for just one code on each screen; on the later batches I had to enter two codes at a time, then three and, by the end of the day, four. The batches also got bigger - the early ones were 40 then 50 cases, then from the fourth box on they were 100. I spent the whole day doing these, apart from lunch and brief interludes when Sue and Elaine had to show me a couple of things. Several ailments came up quite a lot so I got to learn a few of the codes by heart. At the end of each batch you could see all your mistakes; I made one to three on most of them, but swept through my penultimate batch of the day, no. 7, with a 100% record. Batch 8 brought me crashing back down to earth : I had seven mistakes on there, once when I'd fallen for the boobytrap of coding cardiovascular accident with the code for the very frequently occurring cerebrovascular accident, and a couple of times when I'd had a choice of two codes that seemed to fit and picked the wrong one. So I added my own pencilled notes to the many written by people that came before me in the margins of my battered codebook. Sue was surprised when I turned down her offer to give me a brand new copy in exchange for the old book, but my logic was that the additional information written in by the annotators is already in the old one, while I would have had to waste pretty much a whole work day copying it all into the new one.

The parents left for Portugal this morning, so I have to go and water the plants.