The Northern Hospital Part 3

hey peeps, it's been awhile since I last updated my blog. I was away to prepare for my part I professional exam for the last couple weeks. Now, everything is over and I finally got time to complete my post about my elective experience.

I was attached to internal medicine ward for the 4 weeks of electives, which leads by consultant Prof. Judy Savige and basically it provided a lot of hands-on opportunity. The days normally started at 8am, I will be there everyday before 8am to have a nice cup of coffee before joining the passing over (where night shift colleagues will updated the latest patient's list and current management plan). 

After the passing over, I will be joining my registrar and intern for ward round. During ward round, you will be required to help in writing patient's progression notes and doing physical examination. there are less discussion during normal ward round, so you will need to ask a lot of questions or else you will miss the opportunity to learn. The ward round normally takes 3-4 hours, I remember sometimes it could lasted  to late afternoon, it really depends on the number of patients. 

When the ward round finished, I normally just sticked with my intern and learn from them. Throughout the 4 weeks I got a lot of chance to do procedures such as venepuncture, cannulation and help in skin punch biopsy. I also managed to do some discharge summary for the patients.

I went to hospital 5 days a week form 8am- 5pm. 

Since Northern Hospital is a teaching hospital, I got to meet a lot of med students from Melbourne University some are from year 2 and some final year student. They have bed side teaching going on in hospital and if you are free try to talk to them they are really nice and helpful. I was invited to a few teaching sessions by the students, unfortunately I need to help my intern in the paperworks and was not able to attend all the sessions. 

Basically you are allow to join all the CME and extra teaching in the hospital such as intern teaching , radiology ward round and grand ward round on every Tuesday and Thursday. 

In a nutshell, I will highly recommend Northern hospital for electives especially those who wants to work in Australia in the future.