All 2 entries tagged Psychiatry
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April 18, 2019
A first taste of Psychiatry
This week I have had my Psychiatry placement. I haven’t had any previous experiences in psychiatry before, so I was really looking forward to spending a week learning more about the speciality. All of the students have different placements for ‘Psychiatry Week’ so our experiences will all be different. My placement was in community learning disability services, which was interesting as I had already encountered some patients with learning disabilities in my GP and hospital teaching, so the week would give me an opportunity to learn more about the specialised care these patients receive.
We arrived at our placement on Monday morning and spent the day meeting the team, which included more professionals than I expected! The team included doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, social workers, speech and language therapists and many more. I had no idea about all of the different groups that were involved in learning disability services.
On Wednesday we had a chance to attend a meeting which was facilitated by the psychiatrist to which we were attached for the week. It was really fascinating to observe how the psychiatrist communicated to the service user, and will really make me think more about my own communication skills and how my approach is accessible to all patients. In the afternoon we spent time in a respite centre for individuals with learning disabilities, which gave us the chance to meet some service users and also chat to the carers about what they do. The centre was really well run and supportive in helping their service users when they needed to stay over to give their parents or carers a respite break.
We also attended a home visit with one of the trainee psychiatrists, this gave us the chance to meet a service user in their own environment and see how they are cared for at home. The psychiatrist also had to deal with physical health problems while they were there, and I hadn’t considered this before – I had thought psychiatrists only dealt with mental health issues which definitely isn’t the case! Overall, the week really made me think about how we help service users with learning disabilities; both how we communicate with them and also how they could receive substandard care in a standard hospital environment not tailored to their specific needs. Taking the time to understand someone’s needs in a busy hospital environment can be challenging but it can really help us to make a difference in improving their health and providing the best care we can.
I also found out this week that a poster that another medical student and I submitted to a medical education conference actually won best poster! I unfortunately wasn’t able to go to the conference because of other commitments, so it was a nice surprise. The poster was the result of a project I was involved with over the summer with other students and members of faculty and focused around how to teach professionalism to medical students. The ensuing poster was around a mnemonic that another student came up with to help students deal with tricky scenarios while on placement. As medical students, we can often find ourselves in difficult situations and haven’t been around the medical field for long so can struggle to decide what can be the most professional or appropriate action to take. The mnemonic offers a structure to aid thinking around these issues. It was lovely to hear that others who are often experienced in medical education found our work interesting!
Jordan
Charlie Gallan
18 Apr 2019 12:37
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Tags: Jordan Mbchb Psychiatry Student Warwick Wms
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June 13, 2016
Core Clinical Education 3, is it all in the mind?
As the first year students sit their end of year exams the second years have been getting to grips with the start of our next 10-week block. For me that means starting at George Elliot Hospital in Nuneaton.
George Elliot is a small district hospital, so compared to UHCW it feels quite small but I've still managed to take a few wrong turns. George Elliot organise Core Clinical Education (CCE) a bit differently in that we have a medical consultant and ward for the first 5 weeks, then we swap to surgery for the rest of the placement. I've started off on Cardiology and will move to Urology. So far I'm enjoying cardiology, on ward rounds we are shown the ECG of every patient and asked to interpret it. This is as terrifying as it is useful! It's great practice as interpreting ECGs is very likely to come up in both written and clinical exams. Many of the patients are attached to a heart monitor that can be seen at the nurses’ station, alerting staff quickly to any changes and providing a reassuring beep to those sat working.
I'm really enjoying our clinical placements and one of my best experiences so far has been my psychiatry placement. Psychiatry isn't everyone's favourite specialty but I'm really interested so I might be a bit biased! I had my placement during CCE2 and was based at the Caludon Centre right next to UHCW.
The Caludon provides most of the inpatient psychiatric facilities for Coventry and the surrounding area. I was based on an inpatient female ward. Ward rounds on a psychiatric ward are unusual as the doctors and nurse in charge usually sit in a lounge and the patients come to them at allocated times. It can get a bit crowded, often family members or carers also attend as well as social workers and allocated case workers who work with patients in the community. It was really interesting to hear all the different views from various people involved in a patients care and seeing everyone work together in a way that is rare in other areas of medicine. Many of the patients also lacked insight into their condition and did not believe they were unwell or needed treatment so it was interesting to see how the law impacts on medical care in these cases.
In the last few weeks I've also started my SSC2 project: this is the research project that takes place in the first 2 months of third year. As I had decided not to propose my own project, I ranked my top choices from a list provided by the med school. I was lucky to get my top choice, a questionnaire-based project designed to investigate career aspirations of medical students at Warwick with a particular focus on academic medicine and gender imbalances. I chose this project as I have never done qualitative research before and, as a female medical student interested in academic medicine, I want to help find out how we can address the huge gender imbalance in this area. At the moment we just have to write a project plan and ethics approvals but I can't wait to get started in September. However, before that there is the small matter of exams but I'll pretend I didn't just say that!
Joanne
Catrin Davies
13 Jun 2016 11:00
| Tags: Cardiology Joanne Mbchb Psychiatry Student Urology Warwick Wms
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