Hi everyone! As you know, work experience is a vital part of a medical application!
This is the third part of the ” medical work experience” interview series. I am asking all the big questions of a variety of healthcare professionals.
Read part 1 – A conversation with a Staff Nurse, here and here.
Read part 2- An interview with an emergency Paediatric Consultant.
Keep reading to get the insight you need to make an incredible Med school application!
Please Could you tell me what your Job title is and what a typical day in your life would look like?
Consultant General Paediatrician, with a special interest in Adolescents and Eating Disorders.
So a typical day for me would be in either Acute Medicine, where I’d be looking after very sick children.
Alternatively, I would be doing Outpatient work; doing clinics in General Paediatrics. Sometimes this is with the Outpatient Eating Disorder service.
What is the biggest thing medical students/junior don’t know when they start placements?
Hmm… I think that you can never truly know what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. The important thing is empathy. Doctors and all people really, make judgements based on assumptions.
The secret to being a doctor is not judging. The patient’s problem is a big deal to them to have had to come into the hospital, look at it through their eyes.
The importance of Empathy is fundamental to being a doctor.
– DR. P
They have presented for a reason and the importance of empathy is fundamental to being a doctor.
Medical Work experience ( reflection point): Looking at your preconceptions and ideas, how has this challenged your behaviour and attitude? How will this make you a better Doctor?
In your opinion, a brilliant doctor would be like what animal and why?
Hmm, this is such a hard question!
An Owl, because I think that Owls are not impulsive.
They think things through before they make decisions. Similarly to medicine, they have different parts of their existence.
They have their night hunting selves and then building and nesting side of themselves. In Medicine, you have to be very adaptive and have different skills, much like that.
Medical work experience: Why medicine?
There are so many different answers. For me, I don’t think I could do a job that did not challenge me on a daily basis. I don’t think there are many jobs that challenge me the way that medicine does.
So many patients have different needs. There is such satisfaction in saying to a patient; “I know what is wrong with you and this is how we will fix it”. More so when they have struggled for a while. You see human strength, courage and resilience every day and there is no job in the world like that.
The most important things in life are family, love and friendships. We help more than just the patients, it’s for their Mums, Dads, sisters and friends too.
Medical Work experience (reflection point): Think beyond helping people, why do you really want to do medicine
Could you describe the journey from the first year of med school to your role now?
So it would be a medical school for 5 or 6 years. 4 if you are a Postgrad student. Then you’d go on to two years of foundation. Each year you do three, four-month jobs with different rotations to help choose your speciality.
Then you’d need to competitively apply, similar to university application. You will be scored to determine whether you will get your choices of location for your speciality training or not.
Depending on your specialty, you may have run through training. In Paediatrics, this is 8 years.
However, in Paediatric Emergency Medicine, you only get the beginning of the run through package. Only the first six years will run through and then you’ll have to apply again to be an emergency Medic. This is for the last two years of training.
What is the biggest misconception you think the general public has about paediatrics/Doctors?
Overwhelmingly the biggest misconception is that it is really sad. I would be a rich woman if I placed a bet on what the first phrase people say will be when I tell them my job. They say, “Oh that’s so sad, I couldn’t do that.”
Actually, very few children die, most children that are very sick will get better. Yes, we see really sick children. However, the beauty of Paediatrics is that one day you have a child on death’s door. Yet, three days later is running round the ward playing hide and seek!
The turnaround time for recovery is very quick, children get better quickly. When it is sad, and there are losses, we are well supported. We attend the funerals as a team, we cry, we organise psychological support, we mourn and it stays with us. We acknowledge the losses when they happen.
In adult medicine, loss is so much more common you don’t do that, in a way I think that makes it sadder.
How would you describe the good and bad aspects of the dynamic between doctors and nurses/health care assistants etc?
This is a bit of an outdated question. There is no hierarchy, we work together. We are a team, it’s cog and wheel, we can’t work without them, they cannot work without us. Together, we see the patient and treat them. We enter into the same notes and I couldn’t do my job without them.
We can’t work without them, they cannot work without us.
DR.p
Even in my training, and I am not that old, going back to when I worked as a Nursing Auxiliary in 2001, there was much more of a hierarchy. It was no doubt a boys club, it’s very different now.
Medical work experience: What is the most valuable lesson you have learned in your time as a doctor?
Without using the same answer about empathy again,my job has taught me a huge amount about people. It’s a huge privilege to be able to see people at their most vulnerable, and I think there is something I have learned about how much trust patients and their family put in us as Doctors. They trust us to be able to care for them and for their children, the most important people in their life. They trust our dedication, honesty and ability.
Medical work experience: How is what you do different from nurses/ healthcare assistants etc?
I have never heard this question before. The jobs are definitely different. I was a Nursing Auxiliary for years and I Loved it! I even had a crisis of confidence at one point, I thought “ Gosh, I really enjoy this job, am I making the wrong decision?”. The main difference is in Autonomy. In being a Doctor, a disadvantage is the amount of time you spend with the patient, you hand over on ward rounds, you make management decisions and thenIll delegate my juniors some jobs and I review results.
The difference between me and my Nursing colleagues is that they are allocated a certain number, between one and five patients, their job is to care for those patients for the day, offer them food, feed them through tubes, administer medication if needed. They cry with the families and hold their hands.
One medical student told me once that they had to put a cannula into a patient’s arm for some reason and that they did want to do Paediatric medicine but it seemed that the entire job was doing painful procedures on children!
We, as Doctors although we are caring, we are often the ones making decisions and it isn’t the same type of caring. In a nursing role however, I would feel that my hands were a bit tied though, there aren’t as many diagnostic decisions in Nursing as we have in our hands as a doctor. I enjoy a challenge and diagnosing patients.
Medical work experience ( reflection point): Why do you want to do medicine and not nursing? What makes you stand out as a potentially great Doctor? What insight have you gained into the MDT?
What is the thing you enjoy most about your job and what is most challenging?
The biggest challenges:
My job is highly emotive, you deal with people at the extremes of their emotions, sometimes the job is challenging, sometimes you do lose patients. We work bloody hard, to put it frankly. I think people think that we are well paid, we are very poorly paid if you work out what we earn per hour if you divide up the hours we work it’s less than minimum wage.
If you are a builder and you make a mistake it can be fixed, if you are a lawyer, you may put a contract together wrong. If I make a mistake someone may die, they may lose a limb and maybe severely disabled for their whole life. This is the reason some people don’t complete the training. We are all human and we do make mistakes, it is challenging to think about the results of your mistakes. Hand in hand, if I make a mistake, I can be criminally prosecuted. I go to work to help people, but can be prosecuted for my mistakes, and that is hard.
Medical work experience (reflection point): How have you understood the demands of medicine from this? What activities and traits do you have that will prepare you for this?
I love working with passionate people.
-DR.
What I enjoy most:
I’m a paediatrician, so the children are hilarious. I enjoy being challenged. In Paediatrics, I see children with anything and everything . On my ward rounds there are patients with all types of problems, my role is so varied There are areas in medicine where you are so super specialist, you see the same things again and again, but Paediatrics is very versatile.
I love working with Passionate people. I spoke to someone who is not a doctor and who works in management consultancy. She once told me that “you don’t do the job because you enjoy it, you do it because that’s your job”. I cannot imagine getting up every day and doing a job you don’t enjoy, sometimes I take that for granted, not everyone loves their job.
Medical work experience: What was it like to be a paediatric doctor during COVID 19?
In Paediatrics, its different, children are not significantly affected by COVID. All our cases have been incidental findings. The children have been admitted for other things and then found to be COVID positive.
The effects of COVID itself on our patient population has been negligent, fear has been the more prevalent issue. People feel they have to stay at home and “not trouble us,” as we are “working so hard”.
First of all, we were very quiet. I went from having 40 In patients to having 2. I was thinking you know, “where are all the unwell children?”
What we found was that we had really, realy, unwell children coming in as people presented [with their symptoms] late and stayed at home and ignored the problem. It was a huge issue as we had really sick children coming in far too late.
The Paediatric problem that we saw acutely [severely] was caused by the pressure of families being locked down together.
There have been a huge amount of child protection problems. You can only imagine the high pressure environment, and the negative effects of COVID on these issues.
We have been doing video clinics and telephone clinics, it’s been great in some ways. The whole world has got more digital. I think the more senior “dinosaur doctors” are getting used to remote working.
It’s been easier for parents too, not having to take the morning of work, pull the child out of school, they don’t have to park and we can do it quickly online.
But there is a real risk that we will see huge effects of COVID in the future. We have missed quite a few things, working online. I think there will be huge fallouts of that.
Wrapping up the COVID experience…
We have seen that Medicine is a roller coaster.
Back in the day, doctors were revered but then there was a shift in the UK in the attitude towards Doctors. The treatment we get can be really bad.
People talk to you in a rude way, people don’t cancel appointments, instead, they just don’t turn up. There is more of a nonchalant attitude, however over COVID; for a few months people had a lot of respect for the NHS and that has been nice.
Some people in the NHS have been annoyed as it feels insulting. It’s almost like “so we are amazing now, but we were doing an amazing job before?” Personally, I’ve found that it has been nice for people to recognise us.
And we’re done!
I hope you have all really enjoyed this post! I have learned so much from it. Make sure you do lots of reflection as good reflection will make you stick out at interview. Not to mention, your personal statement!
If you enjoyed this, join the team and get exclusive insight and tips for appying to medicine, lifestyle and Academics!
Do follow me on Instagram to keep updated with extra advice and insight!
See you next week for another blog on starting sixth form!
-Zoe xx