All 17 entries tagged Joanne

Venturing out into GP Land…

The lectures in Advanced Cases 1 have been tailored to achieve two main objectives: firstly ensuring we have the knowledge to understand multisystem and chronic diseases that we will be seeing on a regular basis in hospitals, and secondly, to understand the links between primary and secondary care.Our lectures in AC1 have been complemented by our placements in hospitals and last week we had our first adventure out into the mythical place that is GP Land.

Our community placements in Phase 1 taught us a lot about care in the community and the services available to different patients but last week was the first time we’ve actually been in a GP practice.In preparation for this we have had lectures this past week about the history of General Practice, from when General practitioners were brought into the NHS and regulated for the first time to the more recent creation of Clinical Commissioning Groups and GP Federations.

Throughout all these lectures there has been a common theme that has been emphasized, that as a GP you are often the first and last person that a patient comes to see.Patients will present to their GP with the initial signs of a problem and it is the GPs job to formulate a diagnosis and management plan.Even if that plan involves referral to secondary care that patient will eventually be discharged back to primary care and be managed by the GP long term.The opportunity to formulate a diagnosis and be able to follow up that patient over time is something that really appeals to me so I was very much looking forward to spending time in General Practice.

The GP practice I have been assigned to is a small practice in quite a deprived area with a large immigrant population, so the practice also has a full time interpreter.There are high drug and alcohol abuse levels in the local population and the practice is also the nominated service for a Parole Hostel, which brings with it a unique population with their own challenges.

While all this sounds a bit scary at first I think this presents a unique opportunity to work with a very diverse population with a variety of physical and mental health conditions as well as giving me real insight into the complex interplay with social aspects of our life.This has really put my Social and Population Perspectives theme from Phase 1 to good use! Working in a hospital you always enquire about social circumstances during a history but actually have very little time or power to be able to actually do anything about it.This is different for GPs who can take a more holistic approach.Come January we will be taking histories and examinations from real patients while on our GP placements which is equally scary and exciting!

The GP society at Warwick is very active and runs events throughout the year about different topics related to General Practice.Their next event is a night dedicated to GP special interests.Many GPs have a special interest, which is an area that they have additional training or knowledge in. At the practice I am based at, one of the partners had been in surgical training prior to becoming a GP, so he performed minor operations at the practice as part of his special interest area-often unannounced much to the nurses horror!

Even one day in GP land has shown me that it’s not all coughs and sniffles (although there are lots of tea and biscuits!) and there are lots of opportunities for medical students to learn about how diverse this area of medicine can be.

Joanne

Megan Earle : 17 Nov 2015 09:47 |  Tags: Gp Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Out into the Wild…

In my last blog I spoke about learning to love my time in hospital and I think I can safely say that I’ve cracked it! All the Phase 2 students have just completed a week full time on placement in hospital. It’s very different being in hospital full time and learning away from the lecture theatres so this past week was designed to give us a taster and identify and problems or areas we need to develop before we hit the wards full time in January.

We were assigned to wards along with our clinical partner, another person on our placement who we have chosen to work together for all our future clinical placements. We will be working closely with our clinical partners so it’s important to choose wisely!

My clinical partner and I were assigned to the Frailty Ward at Warwick hospital. This is a ward specifically designed for elderly people who require only a short stay in hospital of less than 3 days. They are a multidisciplinary team (key Medical School buzz word!) consisting of Doctors, Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Physiotherapists and social workers designed to get older patients back to their pre-hospital functioning as quickly as possible in order to prevent a permanent loss of function, which often happens after a lengthy stay in hospital.

We attended the daily ward rounds with the Consultant and Junior Doctors, taking notes for them, reading Observation charts and noting if a patient had an interesting clinical sign. You can read about what a sign should look like, see a picture or watch a video but you remember so much more when you see or hear it yourself! Seeing a raised jugulo-venous pressure around a patients’ earlobes made much more sense than reading about a flicker on the neck and seeing the characteristic tophi of gout is something I won’t forget.

As well as observing how the wards are generally run for the first time this week I actually felt useful for the first time. Having completed my T-DOC in venepuncture, I was able to take bloods this week and send them off to the lab for analysis. I was also very lucky to get the opportunity to clerk patients in A&E. I was the person to take the history and the first person to examine them which was all very exciting until I was told to present my findings to the Consultant who happened to be in charge of acute medicine at Warwick!

Getting used to learning in the clinical environment means asking a lot of questions but also answering lots. When helping clerk patients you will be asked to summarize your findings and come up with several differential diagnoses and asked what you would do next to investigate. You are put on the spot but this learning experience is really invaluable. This is how I will have to think as a Doctor so the more practice now the better!

You can also feel a bit lost in hospital and often busy wards and doctors don’t have time to teach. You have to seek out different opportunities, introduce yourself to people in the canteen, bleep services who you want to go and shadow and generally get in the way. Being so proactive is a skill in itself so this last week was a good chance to practice and I can honestly say I feel excited and ready for January now!

Joanne

Megan Earle : 29 Oct 2015 10:01 |  Tags: Hospital Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Learning to Love Hospital…

A month into advanced cases and everything is much more clinical. We spend more time in hospitals and our lectures are more clinically focused. Last year I couldn’t wait until things were more clinical but now it is actually happening I’m actually very nervous! More clinical means more complexity, more unpredictability and more patients! It sounds crazy to be so nervous as this is the reason I came to medical school but trying to pull together all the information from phase 1 and apply it to real cases is a skill that I have yet to master.

Apart from an often overwhelming sense of bewilderment I’m really enjoying my time spent in hospital, I currently spend one day a week at Warwick Hospital. We had the opportunity to select some clinical learning opportunities that particularly interested us, these are half days spent with different healthcare teams around the hospital learning about their different roles.

So far I have had the opportunity to work in ambulatory care, where patients are referred to hospital direct from general practice and the clinical audit team. In the ambulatory care unit the patients presenting complaints were very diverse and there was very high turnover of patients which required expert organisation skills and quick review of investigations from the FY1 I was shadowing.

Working in this acute clinical environment was very different from my time shadowing the clinical audit team. Over a much appreciated cup of tea the team took me through the audit process including the large national audits that the hospital takes part in. I also saw how the outcomes of audits are implemented, from large changes to national guidelines to small changes in local services; these all directly improve patient care.

Other clinical learning opportunities I have over the next few weeks include the radiology department, outpatient’s clinic and theatres. Getting a feel for all these different areas will help prepare us for full time life on the wards in Core Clinical Education, which starts in January.

As well as shadowing lots of different teams within the hospital we are also starting to complete some more practical skills training including how to conduct patient observations correctly and learning how to use the early earning score systems used on the wards and how to take bloods. We also learn about basic airway management and more advanced hospital resuscitation, which includes how to use a defibrillator. I don’t think we’ll be in charge of any cardiac arrests anytime soon but it does feel good to learn some more practical skills in phase 2. I’ve decided to think of my time in hospital as a reward for surviving phase 1 and a welcome change from the lecture theatre!

Joanne

Megan Earle : 16 Oct 2015 11:59 |  Tags: Hospital Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Ready, set, CV!

Next week I will be entering the Medical School as a fully-fledged second year medical student. After a very long summer holiday I’m feeling a little apprehensive about going back, will I remember anything from last year? Will I remember the different sections when taking a history and can I still use my stethoscope? At the same time I’m feeling very excited to enter the next stage of my medical training, I’m looking forward to going back onto the wards and I’m really looking forward to starting our GP placements.

Among all this clinical experience I still have regular lectures until Christmas so I’m also looking forward to covering topics from last year in more detail and also learning topics that were deemed too complicated for last year – well actually, I’m a bit more nervous about that last one!

As this will have been most students' last long summer holiday, people have tried to make the most of it. I got the chance to conduct a research project over the summer after receiving a bursary from the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme at Warwick. My project has been to conduct a systematic review looking at the longitudinal relationship between short sleep duration and obesity in children and adolescents.

I’ve learnt lots of new skills that are used a lot in clinical research such as how to construct and conduct selective searches in a variety of scientific databases and have also become much more able to critically appraise scientific papers which again is a useful skill to have in medicine. I’m quite interested in combining research with clinical work in the future so using my last long summer to do a project like this has been really beneficial to me and will be a good addition to my CV. While I may only be entering my second year, medicine moves fast and the CV building doesn’t stop when you get into medical school.

Having attended the Royal College of Psychiatrists conference at the start of the summer and hearing about all the work the society is doing to boost recruitment to this specialty by supporting medical students and student societies, I decided to get more involved in the Warwick Psychiatry Society.

There are a wide variety of societies in the medical school and most specialties are represented. Getting involved in a student society is also a great addition to your CV and can help show interest in preparation for future job applications so it’s worth thinking about how you can best use your time in Medical School. The PsychSoc is relatively new and small and when I asked if they needed any help this year I didn’t expect to be asked to be treasurer! Despite having no experience of this at all I decided to give it a go and with help from the president and vice president we now have an official society bank account and successfully applied for funding from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. This is a big boost to the PsychSoc and I’m really looking forward to helping the society expand over the coming year. Make sure to look out for us in induction week to get some freebies!

I’m also looking forward to becoming a parent… a Medic parent that is! Having benefited a lot from the wisdom of my Medic Dad during my first year I’m looking forward to doing the same for another unsuspecting student in a few weeks’ time!

Megan Earle : 10 Sep 2015 08:18 |  Tags: Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Looking back… 05/07/15

It’s been a week now since I nervously entered the common room at the Medical Teaching Centre and tried to keep it together while I scanned the pass list for my name. I found my name and immediately burst into tears; I resorted to thumbs up signs so friends knew they were tears of joy and made my way outside, as a second year medical student.

This past year has been the hardest ever.Moving to a new city and getting to grips with seemingly endless amounts of information was difficult but what was harder was that life doesn't stop because you're at medical school; old friends repeatedly ask if you’re free, parents worry, grandparents get older and the juggling act is never easy.It’s not easy but with supportive friends and family it is manageable and I certainly wouldn't have got through this year without family and friends, old and new.

Considering how much I've complained about being busy this year I seem to have a talent in finding more things to do, so my first week of freedom was spent at the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual congress which was in Birmingham this year.I'm interested in psychiatry because of my research background and joined the society as a student member. As a medical student you can end up signing up for a lot of things all of which send many emails, however amongst those can be some amazing opportunities.I was able to volunteer at the conference and attend for free, attending talks about new research and treatments was really inspiring and definitely a good way to start the summer!

This week I also got started on my URSS summer research project. This a scheme that provides funding for research projects across Warwick University. My project is to conduct a systematic review investigating the relationship between poor sleep and child obesity, which will hopefully be publishable.I've never done a systematic review before so I'm a bit nervous but also excited to try something new.

So looking back on my first year as a graduate medical student, what have I learnt?I've learnt many weird and wonderful medical facts, I have learned how to communicate with a whole host of patients, I've learnt how to conduct basic examinations but I’ve also learnt a lot about myself.I’ve learnt that I am my harshest critic and that I do have a limit, beyond which is not productive or fun. I've learnt the importance of working in order to avoid reaching that limit and I hope that next year I can put these lessons into practice- see you in second year!

Megan Earle : 13 Aug 2015 11:48 |  Tags: Joanne Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem