Mnemonics are at the heart of medical education. Indeed, several books about them have been published. Mnemocine is a new online repository, its name being a portmanteau of mnemonic and medicine. Some of the are quite biochemically based and outside the remit of some undergraduate medical courses. One good one is the muscles innervated by the radial nerve being BEST:

North-East Thames is a competitive Foundation School and a system error may have directly affected the applications of 34 students. Six of these students may be in an entirely different foundation school due to their not receiving sufficient points. It is possible that this may have a knock-on effect for other students who may be displaced from their first choice of North-East Thames to a different Foundation School. UKFPO have been impressively quick in recognising and responding to the problem.

The Department of Health has released a guide to how medical students can help in the event of pandemic flu. It’s predominantly relevant with final year medics. There’s probably scope for expansion to other potential disasters, although this guidance applies explicitly to this particular disaster.

The National Patient Safety Agency is running an essay competition for medical students. This is the first time that such an essay prize has been run in the UK. The essay title is as follows:

‘The world of patient safety through the eyes of a medical student.’
a. Three prizes will be awarded at the annual Patient Safety Congress.
b. The winner will receive £500 and the two runners-up £200 each.

The closing date for submission is 15th December 2009.

Please send all entries by email to:

Mrs Barbara Wilde,
PA to Dr. Kevin Cleary,
Medical Director, NPSA.
Telephone: 020 7927 9500
E-mail: barbara.wilde@npsa.nhs.uk

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact Dr Vivian Tang, Clinical Adviser to the Medical Director on  vivian.tang@npsa.nhs.uk

The visionary David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has taken some data and turned it into pictures. In this instance he has turned swine flu statistics into coloured-in maps and tables. Visualisation is the often the best way for people to understand things. Certainly claims that ‘the USA have had more deaths from swine flu than any other country’ can sound worrying until you think about them. I’d really like to see more information in this format, it’s a lot easier to remember bits of red and blue on maps than tables of text. If departments of health or the World Heath Organisation made information freely available in a standardised format it would be possible to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to make maps automatically. Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org developed software to turn global health statistics into graphs, which turned out to be so good it was bought by Google. As a consequence, lectures at schools of medicine and public health all around the world became more interesting. If someone could make software to make maps using this precedent that would be much appreciated by students and policy makers everywhere.

Elective scholarships are available through the British Medical and Dental Students Trust (BMDST), a charitable organisation. MDDUS members can apply for awards of £100 and £1000. The MDDUS is an independent organisation offering legal advice and professional indemnity for doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals. The deadline for applications is 31st January for electives taking place between April and September.  Grants were in the past granted in March and September, but are now simply granted in March of every year.  Figures for the variation in applications and grants given can be found in this table. The overall success rate is around 20%. The BMDST is working on its own website, but for now a page is hosted by the MDDUS. It is largely funded by the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. This resource is underused at present, and is a great opportunity to find funding to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The UKFPO questions for 2010 application have been released. The deadline for filling them in online is next Friday 23rd. Get on it, final years. I still can’t believe they changed the West Midlands Foundation Schools at the last minute without any consultation. The following questions are scored at 10 points each and have a 200 word limit. They are numbered 2-6 as question 1 is simply filling in previous academic qualifications.

Question 2

Describe a case from your clinical experience that you have observed in the first 24 hours from hospital admission. How did members of different professional teams interact and how did this contribute to effective patient care? What did you learn from this that will influence your future practice as a new doctor?

Question 3

Describe a memorable experience of being taught and how this has shaped your thinking about teaching. Identify a particular situation in which you might be teaching as a doctor in the future. Describe how you might apply what you have learned to maximise the effectiveness of your teaching.

Question 4

You are one of two foundation doctors on a ward round. The registrar identifies a minor error made by your colleague and makes inappropriate critical comments in front of the patient and the healthcare team. Your colleague is visibly distressed. What actions would you take and how would you prioritise these? What actions do you believe your colleague should take in relation to these comments? How might you address a minor error made by a more junior colleague in the future?

Question 5

Describe one example from your medical training when you received feedback on an aspect of your performance. Explain how that feedback altered your subsequent practice. How will you use this experience to develop a specific aspect of your foundation training?

Question 6

At times, the patient and the medical team have different ideas on the management of the patient’s illness, because of personal, social or cultural views held by the patient. Describe a clinical case where you have observed this. Identify the factors that contributed to these differing views. Why is it important to understand these differences in your practice as a foundation doctor?

Many UK medical students begin university as teenagers, go through five or six years of training and then come out the other end as doctors. Medical school is notoriously difficult and many will have to resit examinations of some sort. What is less widely known is that an increasing number of students go through “fitness to practise”procedures. Abbreviated to “FTP” (or “F2P” by the more trendy medical schools), fitness to practise is a much-feared buzz-phrase. Once it became widely adopted, lectures were able to casually drop into their talks that being late could potentially be a “fitness to practise issue”. University staff were able to mention off-hand that students not checking their email regularly enough could be casting doubts on their “fitness to practise” as doctors. Medics in older years would tell first-year students that not attending certain social events in welcome week (the re-branded freshers’ week) could constitute a “fitness to practise issue”. Such is the gravity these words are imbued with that some would believe these lies.

Historically, there have been great discrepancies between proceedings in different medical schools. What would be seen as a jolly prank at one institution would be seen as definitive proof that a young person was unsuitable to ever be a doctor at another. These discrepancies were sufficient to spur the GMC into action. Standardised procedures define the roles of the investigator, the fitness to practise panel and appeals process. The investigator decides whether or not there is sufficicent evidence to determine if a student’s fitness to practise is impaired on the balance of probabilities. This civil standard of proof means it is quite likely that students who are being investigated in the first place will make it to the full fitness to practise panel. The standard of proof in the fitness to practise hearing itself is also on the balance of probabilities, in the line with how doctors are now tried.