CROSSVILLE NATIVE COMPLETES MEDICAL ROTATIONS AT COOKEVILLE REGIONAL

Kaitlyn Daugherty, a Crossville native, has spent her medical school rotation at Cookeville Regional Medical Center (CRMC)  — a hospital she grew up viewing from the outside, and now knows from the inside.

Daugherty is a student doctor at Lincoln Memorial University-DeBusk College of Medicine, where she spent her first two years of medical school living in Harrogate before choosing CRMC as her rotation site. There, she and her cohort members have worked through a mix of mandatory and elective rotations across the hospital.

Her path to medicine started with long lunch breaks. A 2021 graduate of Tennessee Technological University, Daugherty studied for the MCAT while working as an academic counselor at TTU, squeezing in prep time between shifts. The effort paid off, and she moved into medical school.

Looking back, her advice to first-year students is simple: “Have as much fun as you can, try to maintain hobbies, and be prepared to study.” That last part matters most early on, she said — the first two years of medical school are dense with information, and she remembers being handed hundreds of slides to learn in a single sitting.

After those first two years, every medical student faces the same decision: where to complete a clinical rotation. It’s a choice that often splits students down the middle — a large hospital with a D.O. residency program, or a smaller one where they work more directly alongside practicing physicians. Daugherty chose Cookeville, which has no residency program, because she wanted to “soak up as much hands-on experience as possible before residency began.”

When speaking with her classmates outside her cohort she has discovered that where ones does their rotation really impacts the experiences for learning, and she is grateful for her previous decision to come to CRMC and encourages more people to use the hospital as a rotation site.

That decision has paid off in ways she didn’t fully expect. Cookeville is the largest city Daugherty has ever lived in, yet she said she was pleasantly surprised by the diversity and complexity of cases she encountered at what she once thought of as simply a smaller, rural hospital. Growing up in Crossville, she had always seen CRMC “as a space of specialized care for the rural counties around it” (Daugherty) — now she’s seen that reputation from the other side.

Over the course of her rotations, Daugherty has worked in cardiology, gastroenterology, emergency medicine, labor and delivery, family medicine, and, most recently, the intensive care unit. Each one brought new skills and, just as importantly, lasting mentors. Along the way, she learned to place central and arterial lines on patients under the guidance of preceptors — the hospital staff who instruct and teach students — and she said the relationships she built there will stay with her well into her career.

In many ways, Daugherty and CRMC share the same story. Both have rural roots, and both keep pushing to take on a wider range of cases and procedures — a mindset she hopes to carry into her own practice as she continues growing .CRMC continues to grow into a stronger resource for the Upper Cumberland region and it provides a constant support to the surrounding rural residents.

What comes next is still taking shape. Daugherty is weighing her options for residency and specialty, and while she said she’s leaning toward gastroenterology, she hasn’t made a final decision.

Her advice for the next cohort of student doctors looks different from what she’d tell a first-year. “Ask questions,” Daugherty said. “This is your continued education, and treat the experience as such.”