All entries for Monday 13 June 2016

Core Clinical Education 3, is it all in the mind?

As the first year students sit their end of year exams the second years have been getting to grips with the start of our next 10-week block. For me that means starting at George Elliot Hospital in Nuneaton.

George Elliot is a small district hospital, so compared to UHCW it feels quite small but I've still managed to take a few wrong turns. George Elliot organise Core Clinical Education (CCE) a bit differently in that we have a medical consultant and ward for the first 5 weeks, then we swap to surgery for the rest of the placement. I've started off on Cardiology and will move to Urology. So far I'm enjoying cardiology, on ward rounds we are shown the ECG of every patient and asked to interpret it. This is as terrifying as it is useful! It's great practice as interpreting ECGs is very likely to come up in both written and clinical exams. Many of the patients are attached to a heart monitor that can be seen at the nurses’ station, alerting staff quickly to any changes and providing a reassuring beep to those sat working.

I'm really enjoying our clinical placements and one of my best experiences so far has been my psychiatry placement. Psychiatry isn't everyone's favourite specialty but I'm really interested so I might be a bit biased! I had my placement during CCE2 and was based at the Caludon Centre right next to UHCW.

The Caludon provides most of the inpatient psychiatric facilities for Coventry and the surrounding area. I was based on an inpatient female ward. Ward rounds on a psychiatric ward are unusual as the doctors and nurse in charge usually sit in a lounge and the patients come to them at allocated times. It can get a bit crowded, often family members or carers also attend as well as social workers and allocated case workers who work with patients in the community. It was really interesting to hear all the different views from various people involved in a patients care and seeing everyone work together in a way that is rare in other areas of medicine. Many of the patients also lacked insight into their condition and did not believe they were unwell or needed treatment so it was interesting to see how the law impacts on medical care in these cases.

In the last few weeks I've also started my SSC2 project: this is the research project that takes place in the first 2 months of third year. As I had decided not to propose my own project, I ranked my top choices from a list provided by the med school. I was lucky to get my top choice, a questionnaire-based project designed to investigate career aspirations of medical students at Warwick with a particular focus on academic medicine and gender imbalances. I chose this project as I have never done qualitative research before and, as a female medical student interested in academic medicine, I want to help find out how we can address the huge gender imbalance in this area. At the moment we just have to write a project plan and ethics approvals but I can't wait to get started in September. However, before that there is the small matter of exams but I'll pretend I didn't just say that!

Joanne

Catrin Davies : 13 Jun 2016 11:00 |  Tags: Cardiology Joanne Mbchb Psychiatry Student Urology Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem