Reflecting On My Second Term As A Clinical Teaching Fellow

I’m watching High School Musical for the first time in nearly a year.

Anyone who follows this blog will know that HSM is my ‘comfort’ film, and I tend to watch it when I’m feeling low, so a minor setback from earlier today is what has led to me putting it on. I’m feeling better though, and The Keen One a.k.a. Kenny reminded me about why we fall, so onwards and upwards!

In other news, two terms down as a clinical teaching fellow – it’s really going by so fast! It won’t be long before I start GP training (more on where I’m going will be coming in another post), so trying to make the most of my final months as a CTF. So without further ado, here are some highlights from this term:

• Moving from being supervised by the Improvement Team to directly reporting to the Chief Medical Officer of the Trust. Definitely a lot more pressure because my new boss has very high expectations, but I’m enjoying it so far.
• Completing a quality improvement project aimed at improving awareness of junior doctors of where and how to report racist microaggressions and discrimination – I’ll be presenting the findings at a conference in May, exciting times!
• Helping to put together and deliver a new series of lectures for gateway and year 1 medical students on racism in healthcare, with the plan for this to be part of the curriculum going forward.
• Helping out with finals OSCEs and getting to be ‘The Voice,’ so fun!
• Ongoing work with the Organisation Development team to update the Trust’s zero tolerance framework re: racism – we’ll be launching an online reporting system soon and hopefully it’ll make it easier to report issues and for staff to get support.
• I got through the first module of my PGCert and remember that essay I was worried about? Feedback from it was so good that it’s now being considered for publication! #wethankGod
• Really enjoyed bedside teaching with my year 1 medical students – I also did some 2nd and 3rd year teaching this term and still feeling like a proud mother when I think of how far they’ve come.

So yeah overall it’s been a very busy but productive term, and I’m still so grateful that this year was made possible for me. All by the grace of God! The CTF team are such a great bunch, and working with them has been so much fun so far – students really do (and say) the darndest things…

Challenge of the Month: I Am Officially a Lecturer

Technically, my title is “honorary lecturer” but I gave my first lecture today!

As part of my year as a clinical teaching fellow, I have been working with the medical school to update their health inequalities teaching, with particular focus on racism and healthcare, and today I assisted in delivering the first of these lecture series to first year medical students. This also ties in well with the PGCert in Health Education that I’m currently doing, as one of the modules is on making curriculums more diverse and representative of society today.

The lecture was an introduction to structural racism within healthcare, with emphasis on the role of unconscious bias and how historical beliefs about the biological differences in races (which usually came from views used to justify slavery) still impact the way we treat patients today. It was so surreal because my medical school self would have never believed that this could actually become part of the medical school curriculum- I constantly felt like I was the one “making it about race” when I used to ask about how conditions presented in patients with darker skin, so yay for progress!

The lecture had to be delivered online due to current COVID restrictions, but we had a great turnout of over 200 students, and it was really interactive because we had so many questions throughout, which made me feel so glad that the students were engaged enough to contribute.

Our next lecture is in a couple of weeks, and I have so many ideas on how to make it even better because I hopefully won’t be as nervous as I was today! So grateful to God for all the opportunities I’ve had so far with being a clinical teaching fellow – I’ve been asked to help with writing exam questions for this module too, even more exciting!

Here I am looking very excited before we went live today:

Reflecting On My First Term as a Clinical Teaching Fellow

With Omicron cases on the rise in the UK, I’ve been anxiously watching and keeping updated on the news over the last couple of days because I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle another lockdown. In four days, I’m meant to be going down south to spend my first Christmas since I qualified as a doctor with my family, so praying that no new restrictions get in the way of that…

As first term is coming to an end, I thought it would be good to look back on the last couple of months, and how I’ve been getting on with my role as a Clinical Teaching Fellow. For anyone who hasn’t been following this blog, I was miraculously offered this role after I finished FY2, and it allows me to split my time between clinical work in AMU, teaching first year and gateway medical students, as well as working on projects for the Trust Improvement Team to improve support and training for ethnic minority staff. It’s so great because not only is it a role that allows me to do work in areas that I feel passionately about, but the fact that it’s 9 till 5 means no weekends or oncalls! As well as this, I get some university holidays off too, so this means that I can have a whole two weeks off at Christmas, we thank God!

Anyways, here are some highlights from my first term as a CTF:

• Helping to put together an exhibition in collaboration with the local art college to celebrate diversity at the Trust.
• Feeling like a proud mother because my year 1 students, some of who were visibly shaking with nerves when we first started patient bedside teaching, can now confidently take a whole patient history without needing prompting from me.
• Getting involved with the teaching of gateway medical students! As someone who started medical school on the foundation/gateway programme, I am a huge champion of providing more access to medicine, so I’m glad to be a part of it here.
• Starting work on updating our Trust’s zero tolerance framework re: racism and discrimination. I’ve been working with the Organisation Development team, and our hope is to make reporting incidents more clear, as well as to provide more support to staff on the receiving end of both microaggressions and overt racism.
• Delivering a talk on my personal experiences with microaggressions for the third year in a row to FY1s at my Trust as part of mandatory teaching. I’ve been approached by heads of GP schools in the area who are interested in adding it to their curriculum, so that’s been a bit overwhelming but very exciting!
• Working with the medical school to update their health inequalities teaching, as part of their ongoing work to decolonise the med school curriculum. I’ll be helping to deliver a series of lectures in the new year centring on racism as a determinant of health, so I’m really looking forward to that.

And ofcourse, getting to know my fellow CTFs has definitely been another highlight of the last couple of months! I knew quite a few of them already because we were FY1 doctors together, so it’s been great to work with them again and introduce them to #TaieatsThai

Forever grateful to God for all the opportunities I’ve been having, and what a breath of fresh air this job has been so far. I’ve officially sent off my GP application for next year, as I’m now very sure that being a GP is what I want to do, as it’d allow me to create a role similar to the one I have now. Will be updating on how it all goes, but in the mean time, a song to appreciate how great God has been:

My name is Taiwo and I am a Clinical Teaching Fellow

As promised, an update on my post F2 job:

I am now officially a week into my new role as a Clinical Teaching Fellow, and what a miracle job offer it was. You see, back in April, I was all set to accept a GP training job, but the Trust I’d done my F1 jobs in got in contact with me, and offered me this new role.

First, a bit of background information about the offer. Since last June, after the Black Lives Matter protests, speaking about my experiences as a black junior doctor, and being on BBC News talking about racism within the NHS, I started working informally with the Improvement Team at the hospital, helping them to create resources to educate staff and managers more about these issues.

This continued when I moved on to a new Trust for F2, even though I wasn’t technically employed by the hospital anymore, so I plucked up the courage to ask them for a formal paid role after F2, for me to be able to do even more for them.

It was a nerve-wracking process with a lot of back and forth and meetings with managers, the medical school leads, and even the Chief Executive, which was very intimidating at first but I held my ground…

They initially told me that there wasn’t enough funding for the role, which was why I applied for GP training and was all set to do that instead, until they got back to me a week before I was to confirm my GP offer, letting me know they’d found the money in the end. Like I said, a miracle job offer!

So my role is a brand new one and very exciting- I split my time between clinical work on AMU, teaching first and second year medical students, and working with the Improvement Team to create resources and projects around equality, diversity and inclusion (my focus will be on racism and microaggressions), really cool!

I’m so so excited for the year ahead and looking forward to hopefully getting involved in some research around health inequalities, as well as getting more time to relax because yay for no oncalls or nights or out of hours shifts for the next year 😄

On a more poignant note, a recent sudden bereavement has had me thinking a lot about the brevity of life, and how we shouldn’t take it for granted. Make sure you’re telling your loved ones how much you care about them, and what they mean to you as much as you can- you never know what tomorrow will bring.