The End of The Block…

After what feels like the longest year that most of us can remember, we are finally done with our last block of the Specialist Clinical Placements. It’s hard to believe that from now on, it’s all going to be revision and clinical apprenticeships (presuming finals success…). I’m glad that we ended with the Psychiatry block, however, as it allowed us to focus on an area of medicine that we don’t see very much of outside of psychiatry, and hopefully having this block so late will keep the information fresh for our upcoming exams.

Our last week of Psychiatry involved more time spent in an acute-ward setting, and enabled us to see far more presentations of common psychiatric conditions, including Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, severe Generalised Anxiety Disorder and many other fascinating presentations. We were also able to see another assessment under the Mental Health Act, something which is taken very seriously (for obvious reasons) and is very thorough and complete. I’m glad that so much effort is put in place to safeguard patients who might not be in a safe mental state to manage their own mental-health conditions, and it’s good that the process is so robust and observed so closely. There really is a lot of legal scrutiny for the process of detaining patients in hospital, and every professional I have worked with has agreed that this is entirely appropriate.

Looking back on 2017, it’s really amazing to think of how much ground we have actually covered; there is so much that I didn’t know at the start of the year but have picked up throughout the course of the year through many different means: we’ve had large-group teaching, small-group teaching, one-on-one teaching, ward-based exposure and of course loads of self-study. My notes, however, are a complete horror show and I could easily spend the majority of the next two months just reorganising and getting everything into shape! But of course we don’t have time for that right now. It’s all about accessing, revising and hopefully committing to memory all of the information that we’ve learned over the past three-and-a-half years. The task is daunting, but I think we’ve climbed steeper hills (first year, I’m looking at you). My main goal for the first day of revision is to at least get everything on one disk drive!

Now that we are done with our last Specialist Clinical Placement, most of our cohort are now off on Christmas break – which will be nice, but of course we will have the additional spectre of upcoming final exams looming over our heads. I’m looking forward to leaving the UK for a couple of weeks – Coventry is lovely, but I think I need a change of scenery to keep from going mad – and hopefully some slightly warmer weather and creature comforts will be the perfect environment to start my revision.

John

Joshua Galvin : 03 Jan 2018 09:12 |  Tags: Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem