March 21, 2019

University Hospital & The Community

The last two weeks have covered the first two weeks of Core Clinical Education 2 (CCE2), and my placement has been at University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW). UHCW is the main teaching hospital for Warwick Medical School, and is the largest hospital in the region, also encompassing a major trauma centre. One of our named consultants is a renal/kidney doctor, and we went to one of the renal outpatient clinics. The majority of patients attend for routine monitoring of kidney damage, with the majority of causes of this being due to diabetes and heart issues. This provides some good revision of our heart failure and diabetes learning and just goes to prove that no area of medicine is an island – everything is connected! And I thought we were attending just a kidney clinic!

On Tuesday, we taught our last student seminar of the term, and the last before the Easter holidays for the first years. The first years have a month off for Easter, then 5 weeks of Block 5, and then their exams. The exams are definitely looming large in many of their minds, with about 2 months to go before the end of year 1 exams. We did some teaching on getting the most from revision, and also offered some reassurance that everything will be okay! I remember being in the same position this time last year, and how worried I was about the exams. Our focus was mostly on getting a good work-life balance over Easter – it is key revision time, but also the last time off they will get before exams, so it is so important to also have some down time.

We have also had a couple of community days over the last two weeks, where we went into the community to learn about how patients are managed in care homes, GP surgeries and in their homes. The first community day was focussed on clinical audit, with teaching sessions on how to do a clinical audit, which we will be doing with our GP practices throughout CCE2. Clinical audits are activities in which we will be involved for the rest of our working lives, no matter what area we go into, so its good to have some focused teaching on this now. In addition, if we present audit findings at conferences etc, this stands us in good stead when applying for jobs. Unbelievably, our first jobs as doctors are little over two years away – and I’m sure this time will fly by in the blink of an eye!

Our second community day involved a patient visit to a brain injury unit, which was a really valuable learning experience in terms of how brain injury patients are cared for in the community. It really made me think about my own life too, and about the things that I value and reminded me that it is really important to enjoy life as you go by. It is so easy when very busy to not take notice of small things - the small victories and valued experiences with family and friends. Medicine sometimes makes you really appreciate your own life and I think this is one of the empowering aspects of meeting so many different people. It can be quite a cool career really!


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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