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:

I’ve Been Feeling Stressed

And I think one thing I’m really bad at is admitting when I’m feeling overwhelmed, which then makes the stress worse, and I become snappy and not nice to be around. Not good. So I’m writing it here to be more open about how I’m feeling in the moment: I’ve been feeling low lately.

With new work pressures/expectations, as well as general life stuff, things have been feeling a bit much for me over the last couple of weeks, and I’ve been struggling. But I’m starting to feel better now, so here are some things that have helped:

1. Talking about it with people I can be open and 100% myself with.
2. Taking breaks from my phone – turns out being available all the time and constantly reading the news isn’t great for peace of mind.
3. Reading for fun again.
4. Watching TV to switch off for a bit – I recently started Downton Abbey, as well as binged Clickbait and the new season of Sex Education in the last week, just to give you an idea of how much ‘switching off’ I’ve needed.
5. Praying about it and reading my Bible more. I’ve been getting a lot of encouragement from John 14:27-29, and remembering the gift of peace that comes from Christ.

In other news, my first official project with the Improvement Team was launched last week, and it’s an exhibition celebrating diversity in the NHS. It includes portraits, paintings and sound clips of various staff members from various groups within the Trust, sharing their experiences of working in the area, information about their backgrounds, as well as how the pandemic has affected them.

The exhibition was put together in collaboration with the local art college, and will be on display for free to the public for the next month. I’ve been so honoured to be part of this project (organising it all has been super stressful but we got there in the end!), and I also got the chance to be photographed as well, which was so much fun:

Here’s to future projects with the team, and yay for celebrating diversity!

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.