All entries for Thursday 29 October 2015

Out into the Wild…

In my last blog I spoke about learning to love my time in hospital and I think I can safely say that I’ve cracked it! All the Phase 2 students have just completed a week full time on placement in hospital. It’s very different being in hospital full time and learning away from the lecture theatres so this past week was designed to give us a taster and identify and problems or areas we need to develop before we hit the wards full time in January.

We were assigned to wards along with our clinical partner, another person on our placement who we have chosen to work together for all our future clinical placements. We will be working closely with our clinical partners so it’s important to choose wisely!

My clinical partner and I were assigned to the Frailty Ward at Warwick hospital. This is a ward specifically designed for elderly people who require only a short stay in hospital of less than 3 days. They are a multidisciplinary team (key Medical School buzz word!) consisting of Doctors, Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists and social workers designed to get older patients back to their pre-hospital functioning as quickly as possible in order to prevent a permanent loss of function, which often happens after a lengthy stay in hospital.

We attended the daily ward rounds with the Consultant and Junior Doctors, taking notes for them, reading Observation charts and noting if a patient had an interesting clinical sign. You can read about what a sign should look like, see a picture or watch a video but you remember so much more when you see or hear it yourself! Seeing a raised jugulo-venous pressure around a patients’ earlobes made much more sense than reading about a flicker on the neck and seeing the characteristic tophi of gout is something I won’t forget.

As well as observing how the wards are generally run for the first time this week I actually felt useful for the first time. Having completed my T-DOC in venepuncture, I was able to take bloods this week and send them off to the lab for analysis. I was also very lucky to get the opportunity to clerk patients in A&E. I was the person to take the history and the first person to examine them which was all very exciting until I was told to present my findings to the Consultant who happened to be in charge of acute medicine at Warwick!

Getting used to learning in the clinical environment means asking a lot of questions but also answering lots. When helping clerk patients you will be asked to summarize your findings and come up with several differential diagnoses and asked what you would do next to investigate. You are put on the spot but this learning experience is really invaluable. This is how I will have to think as a Doctor so the more practice now the better!

You can also feel a bit lost in hospital and often busy wards and doctors don’t have time to teach. You have to seek out different opportunities, introduce yourself to people in the canteen, bleep services who you want to go and shadow and generally get in the way. Being so proactive is a skill in itself so this last week was a good chance to practice and I can honestly say I feel excited and ready for January now!

Joanne

Megan Earle : 29 Oct 2015 10:01 |  Tags: Hospital Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem