Beginning

I have been meaning to start a blog for a long time. For about three years now I have been following a number of other blogs written by medical students and have thoroughly enjoyed them and wanted to see what kind of a job I can do. If you do get the opportunity to check any of these out, I'd highly recommend them, especially this and this.

The aim of this blog is to hopefully provide useful information to future, current and aspiring medical students. I myself am a first year medical student who has (today) finished my end of year one exams.

I perhaps should have started this blog a year ago, but due to the stresses of first year and not really having much time I didn't really get the time to start. From today I have my last summer off before starting the second year of this course in September. Well hopefully start the second year as long as I pass all of my exams. So over the next few weeks I intend to fill in about myself, the course, and how the first year has been.

One topic I wanted to clarify before I start this whole thing is around confidentiality and how I will write on this blog. The GMC, quite righty, have quite strict guidelines on what doctors (and medical students) can write about on social media and the internet in general. Any breach in this potentially raises fitness-to-practice issues, this is entirely understandable as I don't know how happy I'd if I were a patient and I saw that a doctor had commented on me on social media.

It has been drilled into us over the last year how important trust in both us as doctors (or medical students) and our profession is vitally important. I want to make this blog entertaining and be as open and as honest as I can but this obviously has limits. To this end I have made the decision that anyone mentioned on this blog shall remain anonymous and I will try to relay any patient interactions as stories where the gist of what happened remains but all patient information changed.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing you soon.