Psychiatry and Beyond

As 2017 draws to a close, it’s amazing to think of how much ground we have covered and how much we have learned since the start. We are now coming to the end of our eighth Specialist Clinical Placement this year, and once again it’s been a fascinating tour through a part of medicine that we’ve not had much exposure to up till now.

After spending the first three weeks of the block on a community psychiatric placement, we have spent the past two weeks learning about old age and acute psychiatry. Most of the care that we have had in these two sections has been ward-based, and we have had the opportunity to see some very interesting presentations of a more acute nature. These tend to be patients who have been asked to remain confined to a ward for their own good, as they pose a danger to themselves or other people and are in clear need of treatment. The legal process that doctors are required to go through in order to detain someone are very robust, and I think that this process is crucial to a beneficial and defensible medical service.

It’s easy to think of medicine in discrete blocks: a patient with a heart problem is only a heart problem, a patient with bipolar disorder is only bipolar disorder, etc. But what we have seen a lot of in this block is patients with multiple mental-health and physical-health comorbidities presenting at the same time. We have been able to see why psychiatry requires a strong foundation in physical medicine – doctors need an in-depth knowledge of physiology in order to understand side-effects of drugs and physical causes of mental ill-health, among many other things. Although my stethoscope isn’t getting much exposure during this block, the potential to use it is always there. Next week is our final week on psychiatry (and actually on Specialist Clinical Placements altogether!) and I’m really looking forward to what it will bring.

Along with several thousand other hopeful final-year medical students around the country, we sat our Situational Judgement Test exams last Friday. This is a relatively new assessment (in the past five or so years), which plays a large role in determining where we will go for our foundation-programme placements. We were presented with dozens of ethical scenarios and asked to respond to each, and even though Warwick Medical School do a really good job of preparing us for the exam (as much as they can), I think it’s fair to say that there’s no more preparation I could have done to have performed better or worse. It’s just so tough to prepare for this exam – I guess that’s the point, though! We’re expected to react instinctively and be evaluated based on this judgement. We won’t know the outcome until early March when we are given our foundation-programme placements.

And very soon our Specialist Clinical Placement blocks will draw to an end entirely, leaving us in the run-up for finals. It’s been a long road and a very busy year, but I’m looking forward to seeing what the next chapter brings!

Joshua Galvin : 13 Dec 2017 16:53 |  Tags: John Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem