The Final Countdown

After almost 7 years as a student I now feel like I'm into the home strait. One more week of teaching, a few weeks of studying and the small matter of a couple of OSCEs are all that stand between me and entering the big bad world. I am surprisingly calm about this, although provided I pass my exams I will be starting work in 2 and a half months. Possibly I ought to be more nervous about this, especially if day one really is like the bits they show on "Junior Doctors: Your Life In Their Hands" and I take 278 attempts to cannulate each patient.

At the moment, our teaching is all on "professional practise", which is essentially all the stuff that's quite important but noone teaches you. This includes such delights as confirming death, prescribing and fatal accident enquiries. I suspect that actually much of this has been covered in some ilk or other before but I ignored it because it was all "ages away". And now it is not ages away. It is a matter of months. Weeks, really.

This morning we had a session on dealing with "stress and conflict", where we were presented with some rather grim statistics on the mental wellbeing of junior doctors. I was delighted to learn that being female (check) and having a critical father (check - that doesn't mean he isn't lovely) increase risk of suffering burnout during the first couple of years after qualifying. On Wednesday we had a session entitled "support and sanctions" which involved the GMC, MDU and health board HR people telling us not to be naughty or we'd get struck off/fired. Despite these two rather depressing sessions, I'm actually feeling rather positive about starting work.

I had a phone call from occupational health yesterday, and was told they had "no concerns" about my fitness to practise. If you've read my blog before, you'll know that I've had one or two health problems in the past. Although I've played my worries down, I've gone through medical school being a little bit worried that someone would find some kind of loophole which would mean I wouldn't be allowed to start work, so it's a huge relief to know that, from a health perspective at least, I'm going to be ok.

I am keeping myself rather busy at the moment, even though I probably ought to be in the library trying to get the whole of medicine and surgery into my cranium... Last week we had a week off uni and I did absolutely no work at all. I went home to see Mummy and Daddy Learnaholic and had a lovely, relaxing time. Last weekend I went down to Brighton to the National Medical Student Paediatric Conference, which was fantastic. I met lots of lovely people, caught up with some old friends from other medical schools, enjoyed hearing different perspectives on paediatrics and drank lots of wine at the delegate ball.

In addition to uni and revision, I've also started helping out at Cubs (great fun), have a poster to make for a conference in a couple of weeks and applied for a Master's. I suppose I have to justify calling myself the Learnaholic, don't I?!!!

xxxx