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It's like...spending a day at a GP every fortnight but not actually doing any real medicine. More like learning about how disease affects people's family, what drives people to seek medical help, services available to patients, shadowing nurses, receptionists, sometimes the GP. Highlight of my first year was having my own consulting room and seeing a woman and her baby alone. Have to fill out really annoying reflective writing though, bane of my life.
Second year the game is upped a little, most people get a hospital Medsoc. I got adult psychiatry. More medicine is included, your made to feel more like a member of the team, but still a lot of following every member of the team apart from a doctor. Having said that, every week we start the day with a ward round, then do stuff like home visits last week to a psychotic patient with a senior registrar and a psychiatric nurse, another 2nd year and a 4th year. Was pretty cool.
In 2nd year you also have EPC, which is a half day every other week where you practice history taking and exams.
Great thing about medsoc/epc is that you do feel like a student doctor rather than a medical student. There are many humbling experiences in it that really make you think/feel a little upset. One was the woman who had a stroke who lived with her elderly sister, another was the above woman who let me hold and examine her baby, there was me aged 18 who had never picked up a baby before...but you could see she had such trust in her eyes, I felt like such a fraud with my stethoscope round my neck! This year was having adult psych patients ask me if I would mind escorting them back to their rooms, such responsibility and a mismatch of power! Hell, I'm only 19 and some of these people were 40+!
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Barts and the London
Second Year Medic
Any views expressed are mine alone and do not reflect those of Barts and the London School of Medicine.
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