All entries for Wednesday 29 July 2020

Simulation and the Sea…

The last two weeks have seen my Musculoskeletal specialist placement continuing. A regular feature of our placement has been attending ‘fracture clinic’ every Tuesday. Fracture clinic is exactly what it says on the tin – if you’ve suffered a fracture and been to A+E, they will often pop a cast on to stabilise the injury then refer you to fracture clinic the next day for review by a specialist orthopaedic surgeon. As the specialists they can easily decide if a fracture will heal fine by itself or if it needs an operation to aid recovery. It was fab to see patients in fracture clinic and we got the chance to take a history here and there which was good practice to brush up our skills. A large part of the work of Musculoskeletal healthcare is to treat fractures and trauma and we’ve learned some important principles. By far the most important principal is that any treatment must maintain the a) length, b) rotation and c) rotation of any bone or limb. In short, this means that after the bone has healed, the limb should look and function as much like it did before as is possible.

Our opportunities to see patients face-to-face has reduced since we have returned to placement since COVID-19 began. There are less clinics running in order to protect patients from exposure to the virus. There are telephone clinics running, but these aren’t that useful for learning how to do a physical examination. Instead, the MSK doctors teaching us have tried to give us the same teaching (as much as possible) and one of the ways they have tried to do this is by offering us more teaching and simulation of examinations. For example, shoulder clinics aren’t running so one of the shoulder surgeons allowed us to practice a shoulder examination on each other while the surgeon watched and then offered us feedback. The surgeon then also showed us some tricks and techniques to optimise our shoulder examination techniques. This was really useful and in the absence of practicing on patients, was a good substitute to make sure we can effectively examine a shoulder in our final exams and beyond.

We also had some simulation teaching for our end of block OSLER. What is an OSLER I hear you ask? An OSLER is a practice patient encounter – so we are observed doing a history, conducting an examination and then it ends with a viva style discussion about what we think is wrong with the patient, what tests we would order and what treatment we would like to offer the patient. We have to do at least one per block. Again, the OSLER is meant to be done on a real patient, but for this block we had a volunteer – the block lead! I won’t pretend that doing a knee examination on the block lead wasn’t slightly terrifying. But it was good practice and he offered some good pointers for improving our technique and also showed us he would examine a knee or hip, which was handy to reinforce the technique.

This week ended with a presentation on the Friday about polytrauma. Every Friday we have a case presentation, where a student does a presentation or brings an interesting patient case to discuss and all learn from. These sessions are facilitated by one of the doctors who specialise in medical education and are generally very good quality. This week, I had volunteered to bring a topic and a case, and the subject for discussion was polytrauma. I did a short presentation on managing major trauma (i.e. a road traffic accident) and then presented an interesting case that we had seen. I was nervous for the presentation, but actually it went quite well and some of my cheesy jokes definitely helped break the ice.

That’s my rundown for my last 2 weeks! I finished Friday afternoon and decided to have a spontaneous weekend in Newquay, made better by the fact we have Monday off. Medicine does have its perks!

Megan Earle : 29 Jul 2020 08:39 |  Tags: Mbchb Musculoskeletal Patients Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem