A New Block and a New Hospital

We’ve just started the final block of our Core Clinical Education module. It’s hard to believe that the second year is almost over – this officially marks the halfway point in our journey through med school. As with most students in our cohort, my clinical partner and I are at a new hospital for the final ten weeks of the year. With this comes an entirely new set of corridors to memorise, IT systems to navigate and ward-round schedules to memories. I think this is what it’s going to be like for a very long time if we continue pursuing our careers in the NHS! The rotations throughout the rest of med school and beyond – into the foundation programme and even specialist training – will see us rotated about like this as well.

As the first core-clinical education block focused on history-taking and examination, and the second block focused on investigations and diagnosis, this final block will focus on management of conditions, diseases and illnesses. And of course “management” is more than just giving someone some pills or scheduling a date for them to turn up to operating theatre. We are highly encouraged to take a wide approach to condition management, considering all aspects of a patient’s health. We adhere to the bio-psycho-social model, examining the biological component of condition management alongside any impact that a patient’s condition may have upon the psychological and social aspects of their lives. It’s fascinating to see how this plays out in practice.

My assigned consultant for the first section of this block is a gastroenterologist, and my clinical partner has been given a cardiologist. Since our assigned consultants are employed in this aspect to support, teach and evaluate us, this means that we will spend a lot of time focusing on real core medicine with these doctors – the stuff we learned in the first term of the first year, and among my favourite part of the curriculum. It’s time to brush up on interpreting ECG tracings, hepatic metabolism of drugs and the mechanism of action for lots of different diuretics (among many other things)! This makes a major change from the previous block, where we were both linked with orthopaedic surgeons, and brings us back to some of the stuff we learned about quite early on.

Earlier this week we were lucky enough to see a few minor operations pertaining to cardiac abnormalities. First, we saw the placement of a pacemaker. The consultant cardiologist who performed the procedure was actually the same gentleman who lectured us about it back in Advanced Cases 1. Like most of these experiences, it was like an anatomy lesson come to life – in this case, he pointed out to us the patient’s cephalic vein, which he was going to use to access the heart (how he was able to find that vein and know that it was the right one, I will never know). The patient was conscious the entire time, and the entire procedure was conducted under local anaesthetic! We also saw the insertion of a few devices into other patients that function very similar to memory sticks – they collect information about a patient’s heart function over the course of months and even years. They are indicated in many situations, including strokes and various forms of arrhythmia. I look forward to seeing many more sorts of these procedures and many more over the coming weeks and months.

John

Catrin Davies : 09 Jun 2016 09:15 |  Tags: Cardiology Gastroenterology John Mbchb Medicine Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem