Unnecessary

Today the FM went to a clinic where her consultant went to see someone with a hydrocele. But said consultant does not deal with hydroceles and this patient should not have been sent to her clinic.

But no need to worry, surely said consultant should be able to refer this patient directly to a relevant consultant and clinic?

No, instead a letter was written to the GP making a recommendation and said patient was to make an apointment with the GP to be told they were going to referred elsewhere

Very silly.

MTAS

Oh dear, where do I begin.

In summary my career might depend on my abiity to answere a couple of questions using the right jargon (apologies - keywords).

Anyway, 10% of these answers will be audited, i.e. some poor sod will be asked to prove his/her answers.

But what counts as evidence? Everything seems to be mixed. Some say emailing your consultant (possibe a year after the example used occured), others say write down a reflection and get another medical student to sign it, others say it has to be a student on your firm.

Its annoying

ps - will be sending his/hers answers of to someone to have the SPAG checked

Teaching

What makes a good teacher? The problem is you dont know what makes a good teacher until further down the line.

Yesterday the FM went to a tutorial on bowel obstruction. As in most tutorials the FM was asked a question. Unlike most tutorials FM was able to answer said question and answer it well with a nice structure. Structure is good, as the examiner will hopefully be impressed by your thought process

And this is all because of teaching received twenty months ago by somebody she didn't know at all. The teaching came flooding back and the FM was able to regurgitate it back. This was because said teacher actually looked like he wanted to be there and simpified everything into a nice, simple way.

So what does make a good teacher?

Structure and enthusiasm.

Fail

A significant proportion of doctors I have spoken to this week are in renal failure of some sort, due to a proonged period of anuria

Medical School

Initial thoughts

Aim - to take bright, eager students and turn them into decent doctors

Reality - Take the most competitive A-level students and make them even more so

Moaning and Monopoly

Monopoly is a board game that either be incredibly dull or incredibly fun, unfortunately you don’t know which one it’s going to be until an hour into the game. It’s also used to describe a situation where somebody or something owns/controls the vast majority of a particular market/substance.

For some reasons Medics seem to think that they have a monopoly on “working hard,” in the mistaken belief that only medical students do any work whilst at Uni. This is partly due to the fact that medics become isolated from other students and get a warped view of themselves. Indeed medics do work hard but the FM knows plenty of engineers who work much harder and give up there holidays to do unpaid internships.

Does it really matter if we have this view of ourselves? Yes, especially as some medics seem to think there better then what they are.

Well we don’t have a monopoly on working and compared to some other students (student nurses/midwifes) we have it pretty easy when it comes to shifts – unlike these professions we don’t have to do weekends or evenings or night shifts.

So why this mini rant? Because it’s an unnecessary wall that we put up between us and everybody else. Sure, we are stressed and we have lots of exams but that’s no reasons to think we’re different to everyone else. Plus it makes us incredibly dull at times. There we go – tenuous link to the start of this post.

Interesting

If you’re a patient in teaching hospital I wouldn’t know what’s worse, being deemed “interesting” by a consultant and having a large, angry looking consultant (whose annoyed that they’ve got to do some teaching) followed by eight medical students. Knowing that they are walking towards YOU with the intent of prodding and poking you, or walking past you because you’re a boring, simple case - not worthy of any attention at all.

Frogs

Today I went for a walk which included going past a largish pond. The ground next to it was swarming with little frogs. It was only just a few weeks ago that on the same walk I saw hundreds of tadpoles swimming around.

Happy Days

Tomorrow’s Doctor’s

The GMC published something called tomorrow’s Doctor’s, which tell medical schools what they need to teach us as students. The FM is not really impressed by it as a document; one example is that it only mentions children three times in the entire document. Unfortunately the GMC is the only body that can shut medical schools down and therefore the wants and wishes of other stakeholders in medical education are being ignored or sidelined just to keep the GMC happy.

The Fuddled Medic has noticed that consultants of various different specialties are annoyed that they don’t have time to “sell” there specialities, there passion to students and instead have to teach to a well defined syllabus.

This is a bad thing; it does not prepare students for the “real word” and reflects what is happening in secondary education where students are taught to pass exams to keep Ofsted happy as opposed to allowing teachers to let their passion shine through.