Careers

I am pondering the latest volumes of careers advice to hit my inbox from NHS Education Scotland. I can imagine some of you shouting "You've got a career, remember the 5 years at Medical School....." before wandering away muttering. As ever with the NHS, it's not as simple as all that!

The idea is that after Foundation Training, you pick a specialty or group of specialties to train in. Some have Common Core Training (eg Surgery, medicine); some is more specialised from the start (Radiology, Obs/Gyn, Paeds). Anaesthetics is unusual in having 2 ways in - Pure Anaesthetics, or Acute Core Anaesthetics - this second option involves a common core of 3 years alongside Emergency Medicine and Acute Medicine (so some A&E experience) before popping out into year 3 of Anaesthetics training (cunningly meaning that one has two 'year 3's' for added confusion.

One also needs to have a strong CV to support the application, in terms of audit, commitment to specialty, other learning etc. So more work, more exams and more stress. Just when you thought it was all over....

Update

So after various thing have happened at work, I now feel compelled to blog again. I think I blog when I have some free time, feel strongly about stuff and most likely when unsure of the future, some or all of which are coming into play together at the moment.

Basically, I have been pondering work and such like and lloking at some fine blog posts by other medical / para-medical professionals online and pondering about stuff. Also this week I have had 5 week nights in the flat in one week for the first time since some time back in March....maybe even February.

In that time I have changed hospital, twice, changed specialty, completed the FY1 e-portfolio of CPD learning, and decided to take the plunge and apply for an MSc in Internal medicine (online distance learning) so I may get a student card again, but hopefully no student loan.

It's fair to say that I have found surgery challenging. The consultants seem more remote a lot of the time, and senior support on the wards is often spartan - but often contactable by Pager.....the ward rounds happen whenever, but daily and are usually as brief as can be, even in HDU. So I think part of me misses the support of Medicine and the ease of contacting a senior. Also working for only one or at most 2 consultants made life easier and 2-3 days between ward rounds did allow some time for completing tasks rather than the 24hr time periods.