Module 13 Placement: Week 1 (General Practise)

Home visits, pig trotter suturing, hot clinics and ambulance ride alongs, what a week it’s been!

The Emergency Care module involves 10 weeks of three day rotations of placement in different areas, so this week I was in General Practise.

My new GP placement is conviniently located in the city, about 10 minutes away by bus, and also across the road from my favourite Thai restuarant, what a treat!

Home visits on our first day kind of dragged, but we got to practise suturing in the afternoon, which was really great in helping me get over my irrational fear of suturing. Feeling way more confident now, YAY.

Fun fact: Pig skin is the most similar to human skin, so the best to practise with!

On my second day, I got to see patients on my own- taking histories, examining, and then discussing possible diagnoses and management plans with my GP tutor, and documenting all this in the patient notes.

Felt quite nervous at first, but surprised myself with how much I recalled from previous years, and was able to correctly diagnose tonsillitis, tendonitis and a few colds. It was actually pretty fun! Only saw 5 patients in three hours (we had 30 minute slots for each patient), so I’m definitely more amazed by how GPs can do it all in 10 minutes.

Yesterday was without a doubt the most exciting day of placement I’ve had so far. Had to wake up super early for a 12 hour shift with ambulance service, which was pretty hard, but the day went by much quicker than I thought.

From road traffic collisions, to patients with suspected MIs and seizures, and elderly patients needing transport to hospital, I got to experience being in a blue light ambulance, and was even able to help out with patient assessments and examinations, so much fun! Just look how excited I was:

I move on to Anaesthetics next week, so hopefully that’s just as exciting 😀

Module 3 Placement: Dermatology

I’ve been putting off this post because I found dermatology really slow, so writing this post brings back the tedium I felt during my time in derm. One thing I know for sure is that I am not going to be a dermatologist.

Don’t get me wrong, the consultants we shadowed were really great, so lovely, and the teaching was much better than what I had during my respiratory placement, but it just doesn’t interest me. People have said this might be because I’m too “squeamish” when it comes to skin conditions, but I’ve become quite used to them now and still find it slow, so it mustn’t be just that.

Dermatology involves a lot of pattern recognition in rashes and various skin lesions, as well as new descriptive words like, “papules and macules,” excoriations and fissures,” “vesicules and bullae,” and so much more. It took me a while to wrap my head around it all, but it’s slowly starting to make more sense. Blisters in dermatology are not blisters as we know them… mind = blown. (Well not really blown because derm is still pretty dead tbh, but that little tidbit was something I found interesting).

A highlight of the two weeks was our emollient session, where we rated different creams on smell, texture and taste. Yes, taste. The reason for this was apparently patients come in complaining that their partners don’t like the taste of their creams… yeah. So the nurse leading our session thought it might be good for us to understand issues patients have, by tasting them ourselves. How did it go? Well it took me a while to get rid of the taste of urea in my mouth, so I can confidently say it’s something I won’t be trying again.

On the up side we got free samples, so it was well worth it:

Our time in derm involved clinics, watching minor operations (So. Many. Biopsies), and phototherapy, which was pretty cool. Another highlight was an introduction to suturing, where we practised the basics on a fake arm and some chicken. I wasn’t much of a natural, so surgery might not be for me either…

The best thing to come out of my time in dermatology was learning that GPs with ‘special interest’ come in once or twice or week to run clinics or do surgery. You see, I’ve always been under the impression that GPs don’t leave their surgeries at all, so this has completely changed the game for me; I could be a GP with special interest in something else! This is now something I’m considering as well as Paeds; the possibilities are endless…