Communication...

Yesterday was Comms skills, and despite Faculty knowing that there are only 5 roles per session, and only 4 sessions through the year, they put 6 people in each group!

Because I as off ill for our introductory session, I didn't have a role yesterday, so I watched the other 5 - who were really quite good, and tried to give useful comments in the spirit of our peer support curriculum.

I also noticed that faculty have been out spending money again. Not only do we have 3 plasma screens around the place with a list of what lectures / tutorials etc are taking place in which areas of the building each day, but we now have plasma screens in the Comms Skills rooms.

Until now, the camera / mic in the Comms Skills consulting room have been linked through to a small 24" TV/Video combi unit in the 'group' room next door. Soon though faculty wants us to move to a DVD based system. The idea is that each student will be able to record each consultation onto DVD for review later. In most rooms the DVD recorder's are in place, but in their wisdom, faculty have also purchased a 48" plasma/LCD screen (I can't tell which as it still had a cover on it) for each room.

My issues with it are:

a) why could the DVD recorder not just be hooked into the existing TV
b) how much are the plasma screens costing - my guess is about £8k for them all
c) if students are expected to record the stuff onto DVD, then the DVD will have to be finalised in that machine before it will play on any other machine, so this will be a 'cost' of one DVDR per session.
d) This outlay is despite the same department saying that copying all the Clinical Skills instruction videos onto DVD for students would cost too much.

Flying through term...

Well, it's Wednesday already. Which bizarrely makes me 66% through my Uni week, despite having Tuesday totally free this week (it is the time when my quarter of the year are on Community Clinical Practice).

Monday
Monday was nice - Clinical Practice in Hospital in the morning, followed by our PBL debrief/briefing. I was shattered and slept very badly on Sunday night, so I was on the black coffee - 2 before Uni, one at coffee time and a 4th before PBL. We only examined / history-ed one patient in the hospital, and she was a confused old lady who had broken glasses and had no teeth, and was slightly deaf. We managed to get a fairly good story along the way, covering most of the main points. We missed a few social factors about her home care and family support, but managed ok on the medical bits I think.

Sadly I didn't eat breakfast, so I was full of nice black coffee all day, which probably made me feel worse. I headed back down to Uni to do some printing then met Butcher Boy for lunch.
He'd been working all day, so we both had lunch about 3pm.

Then I headed home to complete some more of my anatomy colouring book, and also to read through today's communication skills scenario's.

Community Care?

Well the Medical faculty are certainly being interesting this year......

It had been said that although not having to do an LCP coursework this year, I would have to attend the Clinical practice in the Community section of the course. this is basically attending a GP's one full day every fortnight in pairs and practicing clinical skills, history taking and observing the Primary Healthcare team in action.

However, when the list of allocations was published yesterday (for allocations starting next Tuesday), my name wasn't on the list. In a mild panic, I emailed the administrator, and she said that she had been advised by the faculty that I didn't have to resit that component, and that as such, and because they are short on GP's to take students this year, I was being taken off the list, and would get a chance for skills revision in Springtime.

This means I now have alternate Tuesday''s free, and potentially more time if i do not have to attend the Communication Skills sessions as well.