Ok, apologies in advance. This update is basically me just showing off. Please excuse me, I'm a bit over excited!
I found out on Tuesday I got accepted for my MSc - this came as a total shock as I genuinely expected them to give all the places to people who had more experience. I'm really looking forward to starting. Although it's going to be pretty hard work doing part-time studying alongside being a full time FY1 (and let's not even think about the loan I'll be taking out to pay my course fees), I am a massive geek. Learning new things and keeping my mind busy makes me happy. I'm pretty set on doing paediatrics as a career; unfortunately I don't have a paediatric job during my foundation years, so it will be nice to still be doing something child health related alongside my other work. Depending on time, I think the content will probably be quite useful in preparing for the MRCPCH exams, so I may or may not looking into sitting part 1 at some point.
Continuing on the theme of paediatrics (I'm possibly a bit over keen), I've just returned from a few days in Glasgow at the RCPCH conference. I think I mentioned before that I somehow won some kind of prize (genuinely unsure as to how/why) which meant I didn't have to pay to attend - a brilliant opportunity as conferences are pretty pricey. My supervisor encouraged me to present a poster whilst I was there, so it really was a couple of days of CV boosting!
I had a fantastic time at the conference. There were 15 other prize winners from other medical schools there, all of whom were lovely. We had a couple of meals out and got on really well. It was nice to know that, regardless of institution attended, we all felt pretty much the same about starting work (totally unprepared!). I met lots of lovely consultants and trainees who were all super-encouraging. I'm now even more keen on the specialty than I was before.
Right, I've procrastinated for long enough so I really must get back to revising. OSCE in 12 days and all this sucking up will be for nothing if I don't manage to actually graduate!!!
Hope you're all enjoying the sunshine xxx
Showing posts with label RCPCH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RCPCH. Show all posts
Friday, 25 May 2012
Friday, 11 May 2012
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
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
Thursday, 9 February 2012
General happenings
On Tuesday I received some rather exciting news - the abstract I submitted for the RCPCH meeting in May has been accepted! I'm quite nervous as I've never done a proper presentation before (even though it's just a poster so it isn't too stressful) but hopefully it will be really good experience as no doubt I'll need to do more presentations in future. It's also hopefully going to make a nice little addition to my CV.
I'm spending a fair amount of time working on a paper at the moment, and I'm actually really enjoying it. Rather sad, but there's something satisfying when you are finally able to make some decent conclusions after spending a while looking at something. I'm hoping to finish it off fairly soon and then if I'm lucky it might lead to publication, which would be nice. Of course, once it's done I'll need to find myself a new project so I should probably start harassing people now so they give me something to do. I've had a couple of ideas of things which might be interesting to study but of course they've all been done already so I'm not sure whether there would be any point actually doing them.
Uni is difficult at the moment but I'm trying to rise above it. The new middle grades who started last week are really nice, which is good as it's them who will probably do the bulk of my assessment. I got a pretty decent mark for my mid-block assessment; I'm pretty sure the SHO assessing me was far too generous but I won't argue! I'm struggling to get DOPS (direct observed practical skills) completed as there isn't much I'm actually allowed to do - I actually sunk to the level of getting one completed for hand washing, something which is listed as something you can be assessed on, but not really something where useful feedback is going to happen.
After posting my "confession" last week I feel a lot more positive about the mental health aspect of things. The fact that it isn't a "dirty little secret" any more is probably helping a lot. I can't pretend I'm totally on top of things, but I think I'm ticking along on a relatively even keel at present.
My big goal for myself at the moment is (aside from managing to get through my current placement) is to come up with my own research idea and then actually carry it out. At the moment I've only helped other people carry out studies they've devised, and I'd like to get more involved in the planning process. Obviously as a student there are limitations to what I'll be able to do but it would be nice to approach someone and say "I want to research X, would that be feasible and can you help me?" rather then just "Please give me some work". I'm not sure when this will actually happen, but at least thinking about it is keeping my mind actve :)
xxx
I'm spending a fair amount of time working on a paper at the moment, and I'm actually really enjoying it. Rather sad, but there's something satisfying when you are finally able to make some decent conclusions after spending a while looking at something. I'm hoping to finish it off fairly soon and then if I'm lucky it might lead to publication, which would be nice. Of course, once it's done I'll need to find myself a new project so I should probably start harassing people now so they give me something to do. I've had a couple of ideas of things which might be interesting to study but of course they've all been done already so I'm not sure whether there would be any point actually doing them.
Uni is difficult at the moment but I'm trying to rise above it. The new middle grades who started last week are really nice, which is good as it's them who will probably do the bulk of my assessment. I got a pretty decent mark for my mid-block assessment; I'm pretty sure the SHO assessing me was far too generous but I won't argue! I'm struggling to get DOPS (direct observed practical skills) completed as there isn't much I'm actually allowed to do - I actually sunk to the level of getting one completed for hand washing, something which is listed as something you can be assessed on, but not really something where useful feedback is going to happen.
After posting my "confession" last week I feel a lot more positive about the mental health aspect of things. The fact that it isn't a "dirty little secret" any more is probably helping a lot. I can't pretend I'm totally on top of things, but I think I'm ticking along on a relatively even keel at present.
My big goal for myself at the moment is (aside from managing to get through my current placement) is to come up with my own research idea and then actually carry it out. At the moment I've only helped other people carry out studies they've devised, and I'd like to get more involved in the planning process. Obviously as a student there are limitations to what I'll be able to do but it would be nice to approach someone and say "I want to research X, would that be feasible and can you help me?" rather then just "Please give me some work". I'm not sure when this will actually happen, but at least thinking about it is keeping my mind actve :)
xxx
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Merry Christmas!
Well, I've made it to the end of term.
I must say that this has been a very up and down semester for me. Whilst I've learned lots and been kept busy (definitely a good thing for me) I've found there have been periods where I've felt stressed and unstimulated in equal amounts. As mentioned in my previous post, the staffing on my ward wasn't amazing. This meant that on more than one occassion, I was the most senior medic present. Given that I'm not qualified and therefore can't prescribe drugs (or even simple fluids) or do most procedures unsupervised, it meant I felt rather useless. At one point I was asked to see a patient who could potentially been very sick when there was no doctor present. Whilst he turned out not to be too unstable, the situation could have been rather disaterous. I'm not entirely sure what the right thing to do in that situation is, but I decided that taking a quick history, doing a brief examination, sending off some bloods and then bleeping my consultant was the way forward. No idea what I'd have done if I'd arrived to find him unstable - probably just skipped the history and bleeped someone asap. Hopefully I don't find myself in that situation again until I'm at least able to do something reasonable about it.
Despite my stressful experiences, there were plenty of good things about this block. I've got far more confident doing and interpreting bloods and ECGs, and I've been able to do an ascitic tap and insert a paracentesis drain. It comes very naturally to me to be negative about things, and in particular myself and my abilities, however if I'm honest I probably did quite well. All the consultants I worked with were very complimentary about me and said I'd make a good junior, which was nice to hear. One of the registrars even said I shouldn't go into paeds (as is the plan) because they wanted me in medicine. He was probably just being nice, but it was still good to hear something positive.
Continuing on a positive note (it really doesn't come easy to me, but I'm trying!), I've won a prize! I'm not actually sure what it means, but it's a student prize from the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health. I was nominated by a consultant I've done a bit of work with, which was nice. I'm fairly sure he only nominated me because I've annoyed him enough for him to remember my name, but none the less it was nice to get some recognition that I'm not totally rubbish. I'm getting to go to their annual conference in May, which will hopefully be really interesting as well as a good networking opportunity. I have submitted a paper to present there too, and I'll find out in January whether that's been accepted.
Well, it's now the holidays and a few days in I'm getting medicine withdrawal symptoms - so if any of you need any help researching/writing anything or want a student to analyse some data for you - get in touch!
Have a lovely Christmas everyone xxx
I must say that this has been a very up and down semester for me. Whilst I've learned lots and been kept busy (definitely a good thing for me) I've found there have been periods where I've felt stressed and unstimulated in equal amounts. As mentioned in my previous post, the staffing on my ward wasn't amazing. This meant that on more than one occassion, I was the most senior medic present. Given that I'm not qualified and therefore can't prescribe drugs (or even simple fluids) or do most procedures unsupervised, it meant I felt rather useless. At one point I was asked to see a patient who could potentially been very sick when there was no doctor present. Whilst he turned out not to be too unstable, the situation could have been rather disaterous. I'm not entirely sure what the right thing to do in that situation is, but I decided that taking a quick history, doing a brief examination, sending off some bloods and then bleeping my consultant was the way forward. No idea what I'd have done if I'd arrived to find him unstable - probably just skipped the history and bleeped someone asap. Hopefully I don't find myself in that situation again until I'm at least able to do something reasonable about it.
Despite my stressful experiences, there were plenty of good things about this block. I've got far more confident doing and interpreting bloods and ECGs, and I've been able to do an ascitic tap and insert a paracentesis drain. It comes very naturally to me to be negative about things, and in particular myself and my abilities, however if I'm honest I probably did quite well. All the consultants I worked with were very complimentary about me and said I'd make a good junior, which was nice to hear. One of the registrars even said I shouldn't go into paeds (as is the plan) because they wanted me in medicine. He was probably just being nice, but it was still good to hear something positive.
Continuing on a positive note (it really doesn't come easy to me, but I'm trying!), I've won a prize! I'm not actually sure what it means, but it's a student prize from the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health. I was nominated by a consultant I've done a bit of work with, which was nice. I'm fairly sure he only nominated me because I've annoyed him enough for him to remember my name, but none the less it was nice to get some recognition that I'm not totally rubbish. I'm getting to go to their annual conference in May, which will hopefully be really interesting as well as a good networking opportunity. I have submitted a paper to present there too, and I'll find out in January whether that's been accepted.
Well, it's now the holidays and a few days in I'm getting medicine withdrawal symptoms - so if any of you need any help researching/writing anything or want a student to analyse some data for you - get in touch!
Have a lovely Christmas everyone xxx
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