All entries for January 2016

Core Clinical Education Begins

I wrote my last blog at the start of the Christmas holidays as I eagerly awaited the start of Core clinical education (or CCE). As usual I had grand plans for work and preparation over the Christmas holiday and as usual they never materialized. Getting ready for hospital on the first Monday back I was starting to worry about my chilled out holiday but after two weeks in hospital I’m glad I took the time to relax and recuperate before clinical life hit me! These past few weeks have been intense to say the least but definitely worth the wait.

CCE is the first fully clinical phase of the course here at Warwick, the next 30 weeks are split into 10 week blocks, each at a different hospital. I’m starting at Warwick Hospital which is a small district hospital. My base ward is a Respiratory Ward but in my timetable I also have time on the surgery, paediatrics and special baby care wards. Each hospital organizes tutorials on specific topics and we have lots more clinical skills to learn. In my first block I’m going to learn how to insert cannulas and perform Arterial blood gas measurements. It may seem scary to be learning all these clinical skills but once we can do them we can help out on the wards and get lots of practice in a safe environment. Much better than waiting till exam time!

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the junior doctors, some of which are only in their first year. Despite how busy they are they always have time to teach. After taking a history and examining a patient they are happy to sit down and talk through the case, show me the imaging results and teach on tricky topics. I’ve learnt so much from just these short sessions. I suppose that shows you that no number of lectures on lung function and pathology will help you understand unless you see it for yourself with the patient in front of you.

We’ve also had our first day with our community practice. We will be spending 3 days of every block in the community, learning about chronic illness management and how healthcare interventions are implemented in primary care. These community days complement our time in GP which I am really looking forward to. Some of us have also attended our psychiatry placement induction. Later in the year we will all have a 4 day placement in psychiatry and to prepare us for this we had a clinical skills day in psychiatry where we got to practice history taking with actors in a number of scenarios which ranged from an acute psychotic episode to chronic fatigue syndrome. I found this session really helpful as a psychiatry history is a very different skill, one which I’m looking forward to putting into practice.

My body hasn’t quite adjusted to the change in pace and finding time study in between all of our placements is tricky but it was all the clinical stuff that made me want to come back to study medicine so while I may be very tired I know it’s worth it!

Joanne

Megan Earle : 25 Jan 2016 15:08 |  Tags: Hospital Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Christmas is over – back to work!

After coming back from the Christmas break already we’re delving into possibly the hardest part of our first year – neuroscience. I find clinical neurology really fascinating but there’s no doubt that for those without a degree background in it, it’s a difficult area to get your head around. Our first day back had five lectures on core neuroanatomy, and the following three days have progressed fairly rapidly. Then we started our first case-based learning session for brain & behaviour, and surprisingly this was much more enjoyable than I thought it would be! Applying what you’ve learnt to clinical cases is by far the most satisfying aspect of our course.

Before Christmas we had our first attempt at OSCEs – the exams we have to pass focusing on clinical skills. They were formative so it was more for our own learning – we didn’t have to pass them – but thankfully it all went fairly smoothly.

It’s pretty terrifying to think we’re around 50% through the pre-clinical stage of our degree and that in a year’s time we’ll be out on placements. Given the huge amount we’ve learnt in the first 12 weeks however, I’m sure we’ll be well versed in our medical knowledge by that stage.

Now we’re back we get to start our student selected component (SSCs), a module we’ve picked that we do out-of-hours one day every couple of weeks. I have global health, something I’ve been quite keen on since working in this area before my degree, so I’m interested to see how that goes. It’s quite relaxed, with the only assessment is an essay towards the end of the year, so hopefully it’ll be a good opportunity to enjoy learning new something without pressure.

Matt

Megan Earle : 20 Jan 2016 11:13 |  Tags: Christmas Matt Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The End of Pre–clinicals and the Start of Clinicals

For the past year and a half, we have spent a great deal of time in the lecture theatre and in other practical sessions getting to know the human body inside and out (literally). We have studied the structures of cells, tissues and organs, how they work together, what can go wrong and how to manage it. Most of the work we’ve done up till now has been very theoretical – although WMS does a good job of integrating (or at least introducing) clinical exposure into the curriculum, we have still had to endure more Power Point than any human should have to. This is understandable, of course, as the amount of information we must absorb is just huge and the pace is quick and we need to be able to access a lot of it in the future.

The end of the autumn term also marked the conclusion of the pre-clinical phase of our curriculum. Our weeks of lectures and intense group work have morphed into something much more hands-on and practical in its delivery –and most of us our going into this period with many different emotions swirling about. It’s exciting that we’re finally going to be on wards and working with teams like proper doctors do (which of course we are not, yet). It’s a little scary that our hands are no longer going to be held quite so tightly as before – a lot of our learning is self-directed and self-managed. But it’s also very encouraging to know that we are given responsibility by the medical school (and its overseers) to manage our own education to a high degree.

From what I have heard, Warwick are quite pro-active and advanced regarding clinical exposure as compared to other medical schools around. Although (of course) all students in the country complete the same amount of clinical exposure by graduation, and all must meet the same standard, WMS introduces the exposure far earlier in our medical-school careers than many other medical schools, thus making the process of speaking to patients far less daunting than it might otherwise be. We meet several patients during the first year through a variety of means: ‘community days’, in which we meet non-hospital patients in the community with medically complex conditions; brief hospital-ward introductions and examination practice; and various other opportunities.

But now, as of Monday 4 January, we will be joining the hospitals full-time and our focus will shift to learning in the clinical environment. It’s very exciting. We’re focusing on history-taking and examination of common diseases in our first ten-week block. Although my partner and I are based on a respiratory block, the focus is not on respiratory ailments as such, but rather the basics of patient interaction from the doctor’s perspective. All of our cohort are distributed throughout the three main hospitals in the Warwickshire area, across numerous wards, but all will be following the same basic curriculum. I am very much looking forward to the transition towards becoming a member of the hospital team and putting my efforts into learning in the clinical environment.

John

Megan Earle : 06 Jan 2016 11:51 |  Tags: History Hospital John Mbchb Patients Student Wards Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem