Coffee With Consultants...

This is how not to start a day :-

15 minutes after you arrive at the wards for the daily morning ward rounds, a patient takes the mighty leap to reach the Pearly Gates.

To make it worse, it was a patient that you had just gone in to see barely 5 minutes ago.

Not a good start at all for Day Two at Chesterfield.

However, it got better and better as the day wore on.

After the ward rounds, we followed the consultants, specialist registrars, senior house officers and the house officers to the nearby restaurant for a post-ward rounds meeting.

I sort of expected the affair to be 100% medicine-orientated, but our meeting turned out to be a really informal event.

So informal that the topics discussed in the "meeting" were good places to get curry, reputable and disreputable takeaways, good restaurants and experiences in examining medical students in the OSCE.

I guess I'm really lucky to be attached to Chesterfield.

Everyone over here is really friendly and they make you feel as though you're actually part of the team and not just another pesky medical student who gets in the way of everything.

For instance, the junior doctors, SHOs and the SpRs are really keen to teach us stuff and include us in discussions regarding patients' treatments.

An example - a SHO took us to see "interesting" cases in the morning, teaching us loads of history-taking skills in the process.

Another example - the junior doctor we were attached to taught us how to insert a cannula into patients and how to read chest and abdominal X-rays.

Another example - the consultants allowed us into the OTs to watch not one but two operations that they were carrying out, explaining stuff to us the entire time.

Add that to the fact that we get free lunches every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.

I think I love the Chesterfield Royal Hospital.

Seriously.