November 23, 2018

Our first GP placement and getting ready to go clinical

Today was our first placement in General Practice, which feels like a big moment in the life of any medical student. My clinical partner and I have been placed together as a pair and attached to a small GP surgery based in a village not far from the university. I approached the day with a mixture of trepidation and excitement alike, with a fear of the unknown but excitement at spending the day doing some clinical shadowing. Traffic meant that we arrived only just on time, bang on 9.00am in fact! Despite my nerves and the stressful commute, the practice staff couldn’t have been more welcoming and we were immediately put at ease and felt less daunted.

We were really lucky to be place with a great GP. He was enthusiastic, engaging and managed to test our knowledge without making us feel like we were being interrogated! We learned a lot about some of the common conditions that doctors see in the community, and this also highlighted some areas where we needed to brush up our knowledge (particularly the main examinations!). We also learned about therapeutics and treatments that are available in the community, including the option to refer on to specialist services. The day was a fantastic introduction to our primary care placements which we begin for real from January, and friendly and exciting introduction to the world of primary care medicine.

After coming home from GP, I carried on working on my assessed presentation for my Student Selected Component on Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine. My presentation looks at infectious diseases in German concentration camps during the Second World War. I have chosen this because it draws on my previous knowledge from my History degree. I’m hoping to use the combination of my past and current studies to offer my group a new and (hopefully) interesting take on the subject. It’s nice to be able to re-visit my previous studies (and dust off my old books!) and put them to use in my medical degree.

Next week I have an anatomy revision day, where we revise all of the key anatomy covered in Year 1, giving us the opportunity to ask any lingering questions. This is well timed as it will refresh our knowledge of anatomy ahead of starting our full-time clinical placements at the start of our Core Clinical Education (CCE) block in January. CCE is a 30-week block split into 3, 10-week rotations around the major aspects of medicine and surgery. I am very excited to start full-time clinical placements, and it feels like the last year of hard study has been leading up to this point. My first rotation is Cardiology and Acute Medicine, which I think is a good one to have first as it covers quite a lot of the most common conditions we will see as Foundation Doctors. However, I definitely need to revise my ECG reading techniques in preparation!


Jordan


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Our Med Life blogs are all written by current WMS MB ChB students. Although these students are paid to blog, we don’t tell our bloggers what to say. All these posts are their thoughts, opinions and insights. We hope these posts help you discover a little more about what life as a med student at Warwick is really like.

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