How I Found Clinical Placement Compared Pre-Clinical Medicine - My Experience

Hi Everyone,

So I have just completed my first semester of 3rd year. As of writing this I am officially halfway through my medical school journey (feels like yesterday that I started).

Through this semester I feel like I have changed quite a lot when it comes to how I am in uni and just how I am day to day. This has been quite a transformative semester, it is very different to how pre-clinical was.

In todays letter I will go through my experiences by talking about the good, the bad, things I would have done different and then finally how I aim to approach my next semester.

Let’s get started.

The Good

Being in clinical placement and actually being around patients/doctors on a regular basis has made me a lot less anxious of the future and if I’ll be cut out for being an actual doctor or not. The main reason for this is because the F1 doctors at the hospital were super nice and a lot of them were from UoB or Aston medical school so they could relate to what we are going through a lot more than some of the other doctors. I would definitely recommend speaking to the F1s as they will make the initial start at placement a lot easier than it would be otherwise.

One thing I was very anxious about before starting placement was that the doctors (mainly the consultants) would be very harsh or be expect me to know everything. I had heard many bad experiences from people on youtube or in person that they just get grilled on a regular basis - but to my surprise I had quite the opposite experience. Pretty much all of the consultants I had regular teaching with were very nice and supportive and really helped with understanding tricky concepts in patient care or with specific conditions. Don’t get me wrong there were definitely times where I embarrassed myself and got stuff wrong (and sometimes they made sure I knew that🤣) but it was nothing like other people had made it sound. Despite this, I could have just been one of the lucky ones haha → so I will have another reflection on this at the end of my next placement.

The amount of conditions you are expected to know and in a good amount of detail was daunting when I first saw how many there were. It’s the fact you have to know the pathophysiology of the condition, the risk factors, the causes, the investigations, the differential diagnoses, the management and the complications for pretty much all of them that made it quite difficult. Although it is a lot of information to take in, unlike in pre-clinical years, you are actually seeing this stuff on the wards on a regular basis or are going through passmed questions to help build understanding. So it actual was way more digestible than a lot of the pre clinical stuff in all honesty.

The final very good part about clinical years is that we finally have questions to test our understanding. In pre clinical we had no past paper questions or anything like that to go off of for the exam which made my preparation for the exam almost entirely dependant on my notes or flashcards which was quite scary back then. But now finally we have passmed which is amazing. There are so many questions on there that you can just go through regularly to learn stuff properly, and it is so much more fun than doing flashcards as they can get very stale after a little while.

Now let’s move on to the bad…

The Bad

When first starting placement I was very eager to go to the wards regularly and get skills done like taking bloods etc. I can’t believe how quickly that enthusiasm dwindled down. Although there can be many friendly staff on the wards, a lot of them can also be quite rude or at the very least make you feel like a nuisance. I of course understand they are all busy with their jobs but sometimes it just felt very unnecessary.

Travel. Getting up to go to placement in the traffic everyday for like 40 minutes and then the same on the way home really got to me. It would make going to placement feel like a such a chore on some days when I was quite tired. This is probably just me being spoilt as I would usually walk about 10 minutes to uni back in first and second year haha.

There isn’t much else that is ‘bad’ about placement to be quite honest as it is quite fun and it is a challenge as well. It makes you grow a lot as you kind of go from 0 to 100 quite quickly. The only other thing I would say is that not seeing my main group of friends everyday was quite an adjustment. Having a placement with my mates next year is a big hope of mine because that would be really fun. Luckily for me though the people on my placement were really good so I had no issues there.

What I Would Do Differently & What I Will Do Differently Moving Forward

Being more consistent with passmed questions - I was really good with getting like 10/20 done a day but I sort of fell off towards the end of the semester.

Maybe being more consistent with everything outside of medicine, so like my social life and going gym etc. I had quite a good balance this semester so the main thing is just to keep this up next semester as well even when exams get closer.

Do more history taking and clinical examination. I am fairly decent and taking a general history and doing clinical exams, but I need to become really good at them to make sure I don’t go blank in the OSCEs at the end of the year, so I need to make sure to do this way more next semester.

Anyways, that’s all from me this time guys, hope you have a nice holiday and I will see you in the next letter!