All entries for October 2018

An introduction to plastinated specimens, peer support and the WMS Revue

Four weeks have gone by since I started at WMS and despite feeling exhausted, I am still enjoying lectures and CBL cases. Today on the way to lectures we were interrupted by a flock of geese crossing the road. I had tried to keep walking to the WMS teaching building but was quickly reminded that you do not mess with geese. I guess that’s one of the delights of going to Warwick!

We have had a couple of sessions with the plastinated specimens and I have found them to be such a valuable learning resource. I was originally looking for a medical degree with dissection, but the plastinated specimensare better for education than I could have ever hoped for with a dissection. They are incredibly detailed and truly give you an idea of the positioning of organs within the abdomen (the block we are going through currently) which does answer a lot of questions and helps to visualise the relations of each organ. For example, the relation of the diaphragm to the stomach, kidneys and liver was explained by viewing the specimens better than every single time I had loaded up my fancy anatomy app. Being the neuro geek that I am, I could not resist having a look at the neural structures on a couple of the specimens after identifying the abdominal structures. The detail of the nerves protruding from the spinal cord was incredible and I wish I had longer to look at each specimen than we’re able to. It’s apparent that although anatomy lectures are taking the longest to go through and understand, I am really enjoying the topic and I am really looking forward to Block Three … Brains. I am incredibly grateful to the people who left their body to medical education so that we may have this opportunity to view anatomy in the way we do and I thank them for their generosity.

We have also started Peer Support sessions and I have a group on a Monday evening with two second years leading the session. We submit topics we want to cover, and they make materials and we spend two hours going over things. This week we did surface anatomy as it’s something I am struggling to remember (Is it L4, T1, L2? These are questions I ask myself daily). A couple of our peers volunteered to be wrapped in clingfilm (as the models do on Fridays) and we drew on them with markers. It is a great way to visualise the planes and where the organs lie in context. You can’t really teach yourself anatomy just with a textbook. I was also able to palpate my course mate, with is something I am still working on during Friday sessions. It takes a bit of confidence to palpate a stranger’s abdomen to feel for landmarks such as the pelvis and ribcage, but I am slowly becoming more comfortable with it and I know this will be a key skill as a doctor.

We have also started the revue preparations as auditions are held this week. The revue is half the reason I chose Warwick out of the options I had as I love performing and it is a good break from medicine. The revue is an evening of entertainment where we poke fun at WMS and have short sketches, songs and dances all to raise money for charity (Street Doctors this year) whilst having a good laugh away from medicine. I auditioned this evening choosing to act and sing as I vowed to never dance again after giving it up during secondary school. As a dance teacher’s daughter, I have two brilliant left feet. We find out at the weekend which parts we have got, and I can’t wait to get started.

I feel completely settled here now. I can’t wait to start community placements next week and start having contact with patients. We get to explore their condition outside of hospital settings which is vital as this is where our patients spend most of their lives, despite us seeing them mostly in a hospital bed, so it’s a good idea to develop an understanding of care in the community. The block one formative is two weeks away and though I am slightly nervous, but I know that in the long run these just give an indicator as to how much we know. We also have a WMS Surgical Society anatomy day coming up which I know will be a massive help with getting the facts into long term memory.

So med school is tiring, but I’m enjoying every day and the hardest part is the walk up Tocil lane in the morning!

Abbie

Charlie Gallan : 22 Oct 2018 14:27 |  Tags: Abbie Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Teaching, training and decision–making: The Autumn term so far

As I go into week 6 of Advanced Cases 1, I can’t quite believe I’m nearly halfway through this block! Recently, we’ve been learning about vulnerable patients and viruses. We’ve explored topics such as what factors can make someone vulnerable (age, pre-existing conditions etc), and common viral conditions that we will likely see frequently as we move into more clinical teaching, such as norovirus and HIV.

Last Thursday I had a communication skills session on decision making, which introduced us to some different ways of using various types of reasoning to reach a diagnosis. The session was completely interactive, and we were given a patient presentation line by line and had to come up with and change our differentials as new information was given to us. The patient was introduced as mid 70s at first, leading us to think of the chronic conditions of older age, but then halfway through the patient age was changed to mid-teens. This meant we had to change all our differentials from chronic to acute illnesses, which helped us think about what factors actually alter our most likely diagnosis.

This term I have also taken on the role of student seminar teacher, running weekly sessions for first years along with two other second years. We delivered our first session this week, and it was interesting for us to re-visit topics from last year, with all the associated memories of struggling to understand the concept of peritoneum. One thing we’re keen to impress on our group of first year students is that although the course can seem overwhelming at first, things will start to fall into place and make sense as they move through the blocks.

Our three areas of focus for this week’s session were gastrointestinal anatomy, endocrinology and embryology. The first years really seemed to find the session helpful, which was a great feeling. I delivered the GI anatomy part, and tried to make it as interactive as possible by using cling film to explain peritoneum. It was slightly daunting to teach at first, but nice to try and break down some of these topics to make them slightly easier to digest (no pun intended).

This week I also had my introduction to theatres, during which I spent a morning in theatre with an orthopaedic surgeon. The introduction was just that; a session for us to familiarise ourselves with the general environment and the roles of the various people in the surgical team. The surgeries I saw were foot and ankle orthopaedics. I’ve spent time in internal surgery (heart, lungs, liver) previously, but never in orthopaedics, so it was interesting to see the difference – mostly the use of power tools! The whole experience left me with a taste to spend more time in theatres next term and hopefully become more familiar and comfortable in this environment.

This weekend I am attending a course to train to deliver Basic Life Support (BLS) training. I am really excited about getting involved in peer teaching generally and the training to deliver BLS is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. It’s going to be a busy weekend, but good for my personal and professional development.

Jordan

Charlie Gallan : 16 Oct 2018 14:04 |  Tags: Jordan Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Abbie's diary of the introduction to MBChB

Monday 24^thSeptember was a huge day for me and the rest of my cohort as it was the beginning of our Warwick Medical School education. The day before, we had a meet and greet in a pub just off campus which consisted of meeting familiar faces and getting to know new people in my cohort. We also received our Med Soc society cards and t-shirts and had the opportunity to chat to the year above us to get some last-minute tips and tricks to survive the first year.

Monday morning soon arrived, and we had several lectures welcoming us to the med school and who’s who in the world of WMS. We also met with our personal tutor and our tutor groups for the first time. Cased Based Learning (CBL) was something I had been nervous about as I had not had good experiences with group work in the past, but my group bonded quickly, and I left the session wanting to experience CBL sessions as soon as possible.

Monday evening brought a bar crawl with our fetching Med Soc t-shirts but despite five of us trying to navigate Google Maps, we still had a situation of about 15 medics wandering around town completely lost (at least we only have to navigate one building in our future careers). Eventually, we found the place and quickly got down to the business of the evening: “having a nice quiet one with the flatmates”. Needless to say, there were a few sore heads in lecture the next morning, but everyone seemed to have survived.

Tuesday brought the slow introduction of content into our lectures, including basic cellular biology, and we got to experience a CBL session looking at how we work our way through CBL cases.

Warwick has a lot of support schemes in place for students, from personal tutors to block leads and systems run by the Med Soc. One of these systems is the Medic Parents scheme. I met my parents that evening, who are two second years. I was happy to see that one of my brothers is a guy from my CBL group and it was nice talking to my medic dad about anatomy - something I am looking forward to learning this year.

Wednesday allowed us to have some free time in the afternoon, meaning we could participate in main campus events if we wanted to. We also had our Freshers Fair and I joined too many societies. I particularly enjoyed the surgical station as I performed my first suture, which I am rather proud of! One of the societies I had made a beeline towards was the Neuro Soc as coming from a Neuroscience background, I was keen to keep a bit of neuro in my life outside of block teaching. I also joined Warwick Netball as I have decided that I need to physically escape my desk!

On Thursday we were introduced to mindfulness and how to make sure we keep ourselves emotionally healthy during the course. We also had the second of our CBL sessions and I particularly enjoyed this as we had brought in brownies to eat. In the evening we had a “where’s wally” social - seeing 50 or so medics running around dressed up in red and white costumes is the most bizarre sight you have seen!

Friday brought our first day at the hospital, which proved to be one of the best days of the entire week. In the afternoon we had one of the best lectures I think I have ever had. We covered clinical skills and watching the demos given by Dr Gill and Prof Patel was like watching a medical Ant and Dec with Dr Gill’s enthusiasm and Prof Patel’s quick-witted “dad humour”.

We were exhausted after a long but incredible first week, however we still had the Med Ball. It took five medics one hour and four videos to figure out how to fix a bow tie in our halls, but eventually we made it. The food was amazing and one of our lecturers wore some particularly amazing shoes that stole the show from every other outfit there. Again, we had a few sore heads the next morning, but it had been a great evening to relax and celebrate the fact we were here.

After talking to people, we still have “out of body moments” where we keep questioning if this is really happening. I’m sure this "daydream" state won’t last long but the medical school here act like a giant team. Upper years support the years below them and the lecturers are only an email away. I’m looking forward to working through block 1 and hopefully getting some sleep along the way.

Update: Freshers Flu has hit me hard.

Abbie

Charlie Gallan : 10 Oct 2018 10:18 |  Tags: Abbie Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My name is Jordan and I am a Phase 2 student at WMS!

Term started a couple of weeks ago and I’m still settling back in. After a long summer of doing (not) a lot, getting back into the swing of having teaching every day has been tough, but so far the excitement of getting stuck into more clinical placements this block has kept me going. I’ve just started the Advanced Cases 1 block, which runs for 12 weeks (until Christmas), with weeks themed around some of the most common conditions we will see as doctors. We have hospital on Mondays and lectures and cased based learning (CBL) Tuesday-Friday.

Our teaching the past few weeks has revolved around some of the most common medical conditions we will encounter when qualified doctors, and includes some recap of concepts we have worked on previously. For example, in this block so far we have covered heart failure, chronic conditions, frailty and confusion. With an aging population, these are the cases that will take up most of our time as junior and then more senior doctors . UTIs, dementia and delirium, hypertension and heart failure are some of the most common chronic conditions we will deal with, so this block provides a great preparation for this and means that we are brushed up on these common conditions before we commence full time clinical placements from January.

We have hospital teaching every Monday, where we are placed at one hospital for the duration of the block. My placement is at George Eliot hospital, and my experience so far has been great. I’ve had bedside teaching (where a senior doctor takes you to a patient and then you take the history and do an examination while they watch), which is great to develop your clinical skills and get feedback on how you can improve. I’ve also had self-directed ward learning, which is where you are assigned to a ward and you go and take part in whatever teaching you feel would be useful. So far I’ve shadowed a ward round on a gastroenterology ward, which was a great, albeit daunting, learning experience (the consultant asked us medical students to review the stool and hydration charts and report back, which seemed like a big responsibility!). When we’ve had our teaching on taking bloods, we can also offer to get involved with practising these in our self-directed learning periods, which as I have my venepuncture and blood cultures teaching next Monday, will be me soon!

I’ve studied at WMS for one year now. Before coming to medical school, I worked for two years, firstly as a graduate intern at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and for then as a dispenser in hospital pharmacy. Before that, I studied History at Birmingham University, so my path to medicine has not been the most conventional. However, I think having a different set of experiences from my peers sets me apart and gives me a different perspective on some issues. For example I have more experience of constructing arguments and arguing ethical and theoretical principles, which really helps with the VLE (Values, Law and Ethics) teaching, where there is quite often no simple answer and excellence is more to do with how you apply principles. The lesson to take away is that you don’t need to have done the conventional biomed degree to succeed as a medical student! All experience can be relevant and useful.

For me, Warwick was the natural choice. I applied to other unis, but it was really the open day that sold Warwick to me. I think its unique in being all-graduate, so you don’t have to be merged with undergraduates halfway through the course. Having worked for a few years after graduating my first degree, I am currently 25, so I’m not fresh out of undergrad. In that way, I think I wanted an environment where everyone is more career focussed and driven to be the best they can be. Warwick has a mature atmosphere that I picked up on as soon as I arrived. There is also a strong tradition of peer teaching, where you are taught all the tricks to remember the content by older students. I’m involved in organising the peer teaching for the new intake of students, so more of this will feature in future posts.

Until next time!

Jordan

Charlie Gallan : 03 Oct 2018 08:32 |  Tags: Jordan Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem