A Week in The Life of a Second Year Medical Student

6:30 am – Woke up early today as I have a hospital placement which I need to get to by 9!

9:00 am – Arrived at the hospital and the placement kicked off with a bit a discussion of the framework that we’ve been taught to use to communicate with patients. We then have a scenario with a simulated patient which 2 people practise whilst the rest of the group watch and give specific feedback tailored to specific aspects of the consultation.

10:00 am – We head off to the wards with our clinical partners and are dropped off at various different units. We are all given a bed number and we spend some time talking to the patient in pairs.

10:30 am – Me and my clinical partner finish quite early so we head back to the Skills Learning Centre where we have some time to make some notes on the patient we’ve just seen. We have to make notes as we will have to add teh patient to our “Clinical Learing Record” as part of out PPD portfolio.

11:00 am – Everyone else arrives and we all discuss the patients we’ve seen and identify and communication difficulties we may have encountered (whilst maintaining patient confidentiality, of course!)

12:00 pm – We break up for lunch!

1:00 pm – We now have a Radiography lecture at the hospital detailing different types of scans and highlighting different abnormalities in the scans. We haven’t done a lot about scans, so they are little tricky. Up till now we’ve been told that we currently have to just know what “noraml” looks like, but this year we have been exposed to more abnoranl x-rays and MRI scans a little more…

2:30 pm – Lecture over, time for some reflection on the day before we can head off back.

3:30 pm – I return back to my flat and I am pretty exhausted from my early rise and also long day.

6:00 pm – Had a general lazy evening. Made a small start on PBL, chit-chat with my flatmates, tons of YouTube videos and somehow managed to have th most unproductive evening possible.

The reality of Medicine is that although there is an insane volume of work, sometimes you need a breather and you do need times where you can just switch off – so I had one of those evening today!