The Start of Specialist Clinical Placements

We third-year students have successfully navigated a lot in our medical career so far, but it looks like 2017 is going to be the busiest – but most exciting! – phase yet. We’ve had a year and a half of pre-clinical work, covering all major systems of the body and lots of multi-system disease presentations. We’ve had a long spell of core clinical education. We’ve all done our own research projects, complete with lengthy write-ups and, of course, reflection. We’ve been through two cycles of exams and have made it out the other side. And now we have just started the final push: earlier this week, we began the first of our Specialist Clinical Placement (SCP) blocks, where our education now focuses on particular areas of medicine in preparation for finals and practice beyond.

Our cohort is split into eight groups of roughly equal size, and these groups rotate through eight placements across our main hospital sites. My clinical partner and I are in the Musculoskeletal Healthcare (MSK) block, which is actually extremely interesting – much more interesting than I was expecting. The great thing about the Warwick curriculum is that it is spiral learning, which means that we are encountering topics and building upon knowledge that we’ve got several times throughout the course. For the MSK block, this means that a lot of knowledge we gained in Block 4 of the first year – the one called Locomotion – is really coming in handy now. Our knowledge of muscle and bone anatomy, innervation and blood supply is being called upon with alarming regularity!

Of the five blocks we had in the first year, my favourite was actually Block 4. I liked the tangibility and unchanging nature of human anatomy. There are some structures that are complex, but they just need to be learned. And once the difficult material has been learned, it really isn’t going to change. Now I’m most looking forward to seeing how specific pathologies present and how they are corrected, and spending some serious time in clinic with specialists. I’m also looking forward to surgery and watching some hands-on reconstruction work happening.

And even though I was expecting this SCP block to be heavily anatomy-based, there is a great deal of rheumatology taught as well. This is a topic area to which we aren’t exposed very much in Phase I and Phase II, but we are making up for it now in Phase III. We are scheduled to attend several rheumatology-teaching sessions and have already spent lots of time in rheumatology clinics and so on. It’s been really interesting and we’ve seen a wide variety of cases – obviously there is rheumatoid arthritis, but also polymyalgia rheumatica, psoriasis, osteoarthritis and lots of other conditions. Patients of course will also have several comorbidities as well. I know this sounds naïve, but I had no idea the field of rheumatology was so varied and interesting. I might have to look into it further for possible career options...!

John

Luke Pemberton : 06 Jan 2017 09:09 |  Tags: John Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem