Work Experience Part 2

My work experience started very well, the dispensary manager, Jane, picked my up from my house, as she lived near me and took me with her to the practice.

The GP practice I was working at was located in a fairly large village next to the town where I lived. The practice was a converted house where the partners used to live, living upstairs, with their consultation rooms downstairs. They had eventually moved out after the practice expanded and moved upstairs, moving to a house across the road.

It was summer when I started and the practice looked inviting, with flowers in the garden and ivy growing on the front wall. The dispensary in this practice, where I was primarily to work, was fairly small and not staffed by a pharmacist but by two dispensers. They would receive all of the scripts from each consultation which the dispensary would then prepare while the patients waited in the waiting area.

The practice manager had obviously gone round and told everyone that I was starting and that my name was ‘work experience boy’, so everyone knew my name. However, Jane, the dispensary manager, seemed to believe my name was Liam and introduced me as such. Being nervous and wanting to make a good impression I didn’t correct this. The problem with taking an approach like this, I later found out, is that its very difficult to correct a mistake like this later on. Awkward questions come up, like “Why didn’t you correct me yesterday?”. Leaving that day, I thought what’s the worst that can happen?

Being called Liam for two months, while all the other nurses laugh, knowing that’s not your name, is apparently the worst that can happen. On my first day when I was introduced to the other dispenser, Yvonne, who furrowed her eye brows when Jane said my name. The second day, when jane was out of the room, she asked my what my name was and I told her.

“So why is Jane calling you Liam?”

I shrugged and told her I was too nervous to correct her. She obviously found this hilarious and from then on whenever Jane was in the room would say my ‘new’ name whilst slowly winking at me. The rest of the staff soon found this out and would continue to do the same. This got to a point that whenever I was checking a script and writing my initials, I was actually using the new initial I have been given by Jane.

This continued for two months, until one day my mum came into the practice to pick me up. I was in the store room and heard my mum say to Jane “Is ‘work experience boy’ here?”. I walked through into the main office to see Jane staring at me puzzled, then realisation suddenly dawning on her face. Not a single word was said about this between me and Jane, but from that moment on she used my actual name. She must have thought it was very strange that I had so willingly accepted this name, going so far as to change my initials.

My overall time at the practice was very useful and much less eventful, I got to see how the practice operated. The GP’s even let me sit in on a few consultations which was very interesting and I learned more about how consultations were structured to facilitate patient-doctor communication.

Work Experience Part 1

My journey to graduate entry medicine, like all prospective medical students, started with work experience. This is a requirement from the medical schools because they want to know that people actually know what they are getting into before they apply. I thought this was a good idea before I applied and think its absolutely essential having started medical school.

We have had a (small) number of students already drop out of the course because they have decided medicine is just not for them. Some of these people have had other unforeseen problems going on in their life and there are others who just haven’t enjoyed their hospital placements and decided to leave because of this. I think its probably the best thing for them to leave to find what they really enjoy; they really shouldn’t get into a career they dislike for the the rest of their lives. I feel slightly sorry for those people who were unlucky not to get a place and would have really enjoyed the whole experience and made excellent doctors. Anyway, it is for this reason that medical schools really try to get students to understand and experience what they are getting themselves into, because sometimes, at medical school, what I feel like I have gotten myself into, is Mordor.

Warwick Medical School now have criteria that their applicants now have a minimum number of hours of medically related work experience completed before they have an interview. To get a good flavour of what medicine was really like I wanted to experience both general practice and hospital based medicine. To this end I sent about 15 generic letters to various GP practices near to where I live.

I was contacted by one local village GP practice near to where I grew up. The practice manager contacted me asking if I could come in a few days later, to meet them, so we could have a chat. I probably didn’t make the greatest of first impressions due to the fact that I had quite a large cut above my eyebrow from where my mums very lovely puppy had bitten me by accident, while we were playing that morning. This probably would have been OK except when I’m nervous a Chandler Bing version of me comes out and I try (emphasis on the try) to make jokes.

“You think this is bad, you should see the other guy!”

“Hahaha I am sooo funny”. I must have thought.

“Oh My God! Who is this guy”. They must have thought.

To make this slightly worse, during my interview I rubbed the cut which started bleeding into my eye, meaning the practice nurse had to plaster me up again. I must have looked like Terry Butcher by the end of my interview. What an impression I must have made. 

Thankfully (miraculously?) they offered me as much experience as I wanted in their dispensary handing out medications prescribes by their GPs.