Surgery Rotation - End of Week 4

Surgery rotation is going well. We are being involved and learning things.

I'm glad that I already have skills like cannulation and phlebotomy under my belt from earlier in the year, as it is one less thing to be concerned about learning.

We are also at a slightly smaller hospital, so we get to scrub in and assist the registrar from time to time. I can actually enjoy a little bit of scrubbing in and assisting. After a while it wears thin, but I think I'll be alright with a bit of it in the next few weeks, and then maybe again when I'm an intern and need to help out.

There is nothing much new to add. I'm still trying to learn a lot (well, enough to get through) and work hard, because we have a lot to do during the week.

Today I helped out in preparing some second years for their MSAT exams (Multi-Station Assessment Task) and took part in a mock exam. It was quite fun and it really sank in just how far we have all come in the space of a year.

The students weren't bad (a few of them were lacking in confidence) but you can see that they REALLY need personal attention and teaching from people who actually know what they are doing. It is one thing to learn a technique from a list on a piece of paper, and another to actually see that technique demonstrated by an expert.

This is just the way medical school works. You spend the first two years learning the theory behind things, and then you get to see it in action and try to understand how it REALLY works in the following two years.

I always think that it is unfair when people expect you to know something that you haven't actually been taught, specifically when these things are practical skills that you can only learn when somebody who knows what they are doing passes these skills on.

One of the problems with the massive increase in class size in medical schools in this country is that we aren't getting the personal attention that we could have received in previous years. It just isn't logistically possible.

This isn't so bad when it is in the first couple of years of medical school, but the potential for there to be so many interns, residents and registrars that we don't get proper teaching is there and it is a horrifying thought.

My fingers are firmly crossed that it doesn't come to that, but you can't have a huge leap in graduate numbers in such a short space of time without the system failing at some point. I still think I'm ahead of the biggest increase in the next couple of years. Fingers crossed.