Hospital Personalities of the Year

This encompasses everything from the lunch-line ladies who grill your burger to the registered dietitians who wield the magical calculators and figure out how fast to run your patient’s tube feeding. This is, again, a hugely valuable and mostly invisible service. If your patient doesn’t eat, he or she won’t heal. If a patient eats the wrong things in the wrong amounts, very bad things can sometimes happen. And again, it’s worth your while to learn who it is that’s writing diet modification suggestions in the chart. Eventually you’ll have a question about PKU or galactosemia or whether you can get extra green beans on a diabetic tray; it’s good to know who to ask.