The wagon is creaking into gear

Today I logged on to the medical school intranet, where notices, timetables, PBL cases and plenty of other useful things our accessible. I’ve been doing this regularly hoping to find some new info about 3^rd year and partly just force of habit. After weeks of nothing much there are updates!

The next year’s worth of PBL cases have been uploaded, all TWENTY FIVE of them… Wow, I’m still unsure how exactly they will integrate the cases into the hospital setting and if I will end up spending as much time having to read books and make notes as I have the past two years. However, a cursory glance over a few scenarios shows that there are a few innovations in the style. Apparently there is more emphasis on test results, management etc. and also some accompanying material such as GP and hospital letters. The sheer volume of cases is a bit disconcerting, but I’m hoping that they’ll be thought-provoking and the hospital work will be relevant. I doubt I’ll read over any of the cases until I know which module I’ll be starting. That’s the next thing I’m waiting for: timetable please! I would love to find out that I have a couple of late starts per week and a few early finishes, but I suppose that’s wishful thinking.

Another link that caught my eye took me to a mind-numbingly long word document outlining everything I could hope to know about the organization of the student-selected components, of which I will be undertaking two, in each of the next two years. Lots of guff in there, although plenty of useful information regarding marking criteria and the skills they want to be displayed. Unfortunately I can see the potential for these modules to take on an element of hoop-jumping, ensuring you tick all the right boxes for your tutor without necessarily learning a great deal. Fingers crossed that there will be an ample number of ‘kind’ topics when the time comes to choose (as yet they haven’t provided any details about individual titles, only that they will be hospital or community-based).

It’s good to know things are starting to gather pace.

What does the future hold?

Officially just one month until uni restarts! It’s strange to think that I’m not going back to the usual combination of lectures, PBL, dissection and physiology. Instead I’ll be seeing patients on the wards and experiencing life in a rather large teaching hospital, which will be my academic home for the next three years. Details appear to be a bit thin on the ground, but my first unit will be Heart, Lungs and Blood (HLB) or Nutrition, Metabolism and Excretion (NME). How this will translate into teaching I don’t know – however, from preclinical work I preferred the cases that focused on HLB over NME. There was just something I found intrinsically more absorbing with the workings of the cardiovascular system, whereas the GI tract and metabolism left me bored to tears (perhaps because it was in the last semester before 3^rd year and I had had my fill of bioscience and PBL).

As for PBL (Problem Based Learning), there are mixed opinions on using it as a method to teach. I don’t know how it will translate into the clinical part of the course, but my experiences of it from the past two years have been generally pretty good. Maybe I’ve been lucky, for example I haven’t really suffered from having groups with a dozen people who would all rather sit in dead silence until somebody has the guts to offer up some information. Often the majority of the group was involved in the discussions despite the inevitable quieter/lazier members. PBL is also great to talk about difficult concepts, especially in the ‘Mind and Movement’ module. It was useful as a way for the students struggling to have things explained to them, while also allowing the person explaining to test their own understanding. Obviously not all sessions were productive, particularly if you have to rock up at 9am having been out ‘til 4am after a couple of drunken hours of sleep – even worse if most of the others were out with you and feel equally shit! My major criticism was the variability in tutors – who have been branded facilitators. Quite what their job description is remains a mystery to me. Apparently it is to guide us if we go off track and ensure we reach broadly relevant learning objectives. My own theory is that they are glorified prison wardens, keeping us incarcerated for the allotted 90 minutes, while providing bugger all in the way of help! Most facilitators aren’t clinicians and for three out of the four that I had, it was their first time, meaning the blind were leading the blind. Nonetheless I managed to pass all my exams at the first sitting showing that engaging with the system, coupled with self-motivation, and aided with a smattering of associated lectures and practicals, is definitely a technique that suited me.

The modest insight I have as to what I’ll be doing over the next year has mainly been provided by older guys I know from the medics’ football team I play in. Earlier this year, on the way back from Dublin where the National Association of Medical Schools (NAMS) football tournament was being held, a 4^th year told us some of the things he’d got up to within a couple of months of beginning clinical years. Interesting stuff generally, that was until he slipped in that he performed a digital rectal exam. Where unfortunately ‘digital’ refers to fingers and not a type of watch display. Not only that, the patient got a little - how can I say - excited...