2 down, 3 to go!

Happy new year everyone! And by saying that it means we are in January, which means I can say this is the year I (hopefully!) become a doctor. Wow, that is scary! It’s obviously the goal at the end of Medical School, but it doesn’t feel real at all. This year really is flying by. We are now on our 3rd rotation of 5, so are officially over half way through our final year. My 2 placements so far have been 7 weeks in A&E and 7 weeks on Paediatrics and I have genuinely loved both of them for different reasons and they have taught me different things about being a doctor soon.

I am currently on my “ward placement”, and after the Christmas break I think I’m settling back into things. Before we broke for Christmas us 5th years had the ‘SJT’ to do (one of many abbreviations you will encounter in Medicine!) It stands for the Situational Judgement Test, and is meant to be test of how you judge situations (who’d have thought?!) When we applied for our Foundation posts where we will work as doctors, our time at medical school was given a score out of 50 based on our exam results and various other things. This 2hr 20min exam was also marked out of 50, to give us an overall score /100 to be ranked against everyone else in the country for jobs. So it is kind of a big deal! They were all scenarios where we had to basically rank what we “would” do in response to a situation (e.g. you are running late for work what do you do, or the doctor taking over from you is running late what do you do… that kind of thing). It was a toughie, but we find out how we did in March so enough about that for now.

Our next (and final) exam of Medical School is on 1st February (my birthday L ) and is a prescribing exam, so tests our knowledge of medications, side effects, communicating information, drug calculations etc and is 2 hours long. We get to use the Bible of medicines, the British National Formulary (BNF) ß another abbreviation for you, to help us, but the 2 hours goes very quick so practicing and being familiar with common medications throughout this year will hopefully help! We have to pass it in order to progress to F1 and be able to prescribe medications (which is a pretty important job as a junior doctor!!) so wish us luck!

This coming week, on Tuesday 12th is a planned Junior Doctors strike and will affect all of us working in the Hospitals. I’m not going to go into it all on this blog, there is plenty of information about it all out there and why it is necessary etc… but I hope to be able to support my colleagues in the best way I can, as I will be in their shoes very soon and the proposed contracts are something that will affect everyone, so is worth having an idea of for when you start Medical School.

I believe the interviews should be happening very soon for you Lancaster hopefuls, so I wish you all the best of luck in what will hopefully be your first step in becoming a doctor.

Last time I ended my blog with a little anatomy joke, I hope you found it humerus. And that one too..