Being an older student…i think its pc to say mature…but im not cheese, is quite challenging in many more ways than a direct school entry medical student.

I have been at PMS now for six years…it was easy to get in…i just can not get out at the moment. deadlines, exams…we all have them, but is there some leeway for mature students who enter medicine with families and life commitments. i have a handful of both.

im an ex barrister from london, ex forces from before then and soon to be an ex student when i finally qualify. ive been an elsevier rep for five years now and are slowly getting through the whole sales team lol

just wanted to say hello as you might see me blogging from time to time….and no i will not post my picture…its too scary

Having sat them twice now and passed both times, i thought it might help for some nice easy advice.

PBL based course…and i can only tell you about my experiance at PMS.

1. Get yourself a really good Clinical skills book…and read it!!!
2. But not all at once. every time you examine a system on a patient…go away and read the section on the system
3. go back and re-examine the patient….do your findings fit the diagnosis or differentials you have made?
4. go look in the notes at the actual diagnosis.
5. If your not sure ask…..doctors are now teachers (GMC) so go find your friendly F1…they have just been there and know what is the required standards.
6. Get formative feedback
7. form a group early of like minded students
8. take your new learnt skills or the extras you have just learnt in steps 3-5
9. teach your peers
10. ask them to feedback to you

we have done this and one person acts the patient/one examines and the group then feedback after the examination.

you need to learn your skills on the wards though…this is vital. its no good practicing on fit students…you need to see as many patients as possible…you are more likely to end up examining a desease process in the examination you have examined before…the confidence boost alone is great.

fianl tip…be slick with your exam..if you dither you will give the impression you do not know what to do.

practice practice practice

Jay

I use my student consult nearly every day.

Why you ask…well im lazy

i do not want to carry a bag full of books.

my library never has a book i want, one that i know

and im normally using a PC when not physically on the ward…..

all of my books are on student consult….lifes too hard not to use consult

Jay

I have recently been asked about ” How do you go about doing research and audits”.All departments in all hospitals are required to audits! It improves clinical practice. They are great to put on your CV and help you stand out from the crowd!

1. If there is a specialty you like – try an get involved in a audit

2. Go to the department head and bug them, say you are really interested!

3. If that fails carry on bugging them! They are usually crying out for help to do them

4. Research is a little more difficult to get in on – so start with an audit to demonstrate you are keen and the reserach will follow

5. Use this as a guide to audit writing BMJ  1991;302:704-707 (23 March),

Happy researching!

As I am not the first of the new bloggers you can probably guess – I’m a medical student too! My name is Tom and I am at Robinson College, Cambridge – which, as a second year, means that I have seen the grand total of 6 patients since the course began. 

I am going to share a little about my experiences of student life which hopefully will be insightful and perhaps occasionally useful! There are just 3 weeks left before we break up for Easter so the worst of the work for this term is almost over and the 4 main courses for this year, Pathology, Pharamcology, Human Reproduction and Neurophysiology/anatomy are beginning to wind down to make space on the timetable for our options course.

Life is not all work though and I’m also really looking forward to the Officer Training Corps Annual Dinner (Yep I joined the Army while at University), a Black Tie affair at St Johns (one of the Cambridge colleges) on Saturday. It is going to be amazing.

Most importantly, I will be choosing my room for next year tomorrow – It is all decided by an arcane system in which those that were last in the previous year are first this time. I am very, very happy about this after being the absolute last person to choose last year. This does however pose a problem, can you have too much choice? I will let you know

Tom

Darwins Gift celebrates the bicentennial of Charles Darwins birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. You’ll find essays about Darwin’s life and work, and the enduring legacy of his remarkable theory of evolution. These were Darwin’s gifts to all of us; on the occasion of these anniversaries, this book is The Lancet’s gift to you.

Click here to access your copy

“Management” to doctors used to exclusively refer to what the plan was to do for patients. Or possibly to the people sitting in offices who direct the operations of the hospital. Why then is there a British Association of Medical Managers? In 1991 this independent charity set up in order to provide management skills for doctors. Last year, BAMM set up the punningly-named BAMMbino for junior doctors. This year, they plan to go even further and recruit medical students.

Management skills in business terms are not something which are found explicitly in many undergraduate medical curricula. An MBA and an MBChB do not have much in common beyond their first two letters.  It’s good that students have the opportunity to develop their management skills, opportunities will not really come until later career-wise when there are people junior to you. As a medical student, you do what you are told.

Radical changes to undergraduate medical curricula should not be implemented lightly, especially at a time when both the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons of England are threatening to introduce their own exit exams because of reductions in core knowledge of pharmacology and anatomy (respectively).

Hello. I would love to say this is my first post but I accidentally deleted my first, so technically this is my second.

My name is Kayte and I’m a third year student at the delightfully green University of East Anglia in Norwich. It’s a very different style of teaching to most of the country, but it seems to suit me to a T.

I’m not quite sure why I agreed to this, but somehow I got my arm bent, so here goes… welcome to our blog

It’s rare on the wards that students are given access to their own logins to access patient notes. It is difficult for undergraduate co-ordinators to keep up-to-date records with students often moving between trusts on short placements. NHS Connecting for Health has released draft guidance on this.

Junior doctors are often forced to give their own log-in details to students -a practice which is illegal. There are commonly different combinations of usernames and passwords for different systems e.g. imaging, pathology.  Students are often required to perform tasks which require these details.  The draft guidance suggests trusts issue students with smart cards. These smart cards could also other relevant information such as Blood Borne Virus status.

Perhaps the most sensible way forward would be moving the job of providing student smart cards from the NHS trusts themselves to the medical schools. Then the trusts could activate smart cards for the duration of placements, and logistical difficulties of returning cards and fetching new ones could be avoided. Like any other IT system, the main problem would be what happened in the event of system failure.

For students at some medical schools, such as Nottingham and Imperial, taking an intercalated degree is not a choice, it’s compulsory. With the average doctor qualifying with 37k pounds in debt and the economy looking shaky, it may not seem a sensible time to intercalate. More and more medical students, however, are choosing to do so. 

There are many reasons for intercalating. Interest in a particular subject, learning generic research skills, fondness towards a particular professor, delaying graduation for a year. With the legal guarantee of a job as a doctor having evaporated, perhaps it pays to have a longer letterhead.

Hull York Medical School produced Intercalate.co.uk, a site designed for students from any UK medical school to search for intercalated degrees by subject or area. It currently focuses on bachelor’s degrees, although there are plans to expand its scope in future. Medical schools offer the opportunity to taking master’s degrees and even doctorates during their course.

There is one vital piece of information I think the database could benefit from. What is that many people after their student years regret not doing more of while they were younger? What do many people plan to do after graduation? What do many people do for a year between sixth form and university? With five UK medical schools now offering International Health, it makes sense to ask what the options for travel are. Different medical schools offer varying amounts of time and reimbursement for costs.

If you are thinking about intercalation, the best source of information is students who have intercalated. If you don’t know any, ask a member of staff to give you some names. Intercalation is a great opportunity, but it’s not for everyone. If you do want to do it, great, if not, don’t feel forced into it. It’s your time and your money at the end of the day.