Lorna Trenchard

Former blog contributor

Lorna Trenchard

Course: MBBS Medicine

What to Expect: Clinical Years

MBBS Medicine

What firm are you on? How’s placement? Where are you at? The medics I know keep asking all these questions and leaving the house really early dressed smartly, but what actually are clinical attachments?

Year 3 is clinical, with attachments (‘firms’) in hospitals across West London. They are called ‘firms’ from back in the old days when you would be with the same medical team for a while and became like a little family. Firm means the group you are with, and the name seems to have stuck (we like using technical terms to confuse non-medics).

Hospital placements at Imperial covered a lot wider area than I expected- from Paddington (St.

What to Expect: Medicine Course

MBBS Medicine

So, final year, what even is that? And how did I get there?

At Imperial Medicine (MBBS/BSc) is a 6 year course:

Years 1&2 are pre-clinical years, learning how the body works and all the science behind diseases. Lectures run 9-5pm pretty much every day, with practicals, PBL, Communication sessions and anatomy mixed in. Practicals varied from looking down a microscope at your own blood, to drinking 2 cans of energy drink and measuring your observations whilst doing 10 minutes on an exercise bike! PBL (problem based learning) sessions were group sessions tackling clinical presentations (e.g. a man with shortness of breath just returned from LA on a long-haul flight) and teaching each other relevant information.

What to Expect: Top tips for life at Imperial

MBBS Medicine

It’s not long until term starts again, so I thought I would write a couple of posts for the new freshers to prepare you about what to expect during your first few weeks and months. It is a daunting and exciting time, so relax and enjoy it and remember if we all made it then you can too!

My top tips:

  • Where to work: Find somewhere you can work well- try a public library or college computer room. If you do like the library get there early- it gets very busy and warm
  • Make friends with hall seniors: they can be a great source of support and advice as they understand life at Imperial and have been around longer than you!

What to Expect: living in halls

MBBS Medicine

It’s not long until term starts again, so I thought I would write a couple of posts for the new freshers to prepare you about what to expect during your first few weeks and months. It is a daunting and exciting time, so relax and enjoy it and remember if we all made it then you can too!

What to expect:

  • Culinary delights and disasters– organising food shopping and cooking defeats even the best culinary students- expect mushroom clouds of cheese sauce, setting fire to various meats and very unusual food combinations. Best advice: try cooking as a group, keep things simple and make use of the freezer (to avoid forgetting about things and them going off in the fridge).

What to Expect: Starting Medical School

MBBS Medicine

It’s not long until term starts again, so I thought I would write a couple of posts for the new freshers to prepare you about what to expect during your first few weeks and months. It is a daunting and exciting time, so relax and enjoy it and remember if we all made it then you can too!

What to expect:

  • To be behind on work– no matter how hard you try, how organised you are or how much stationary you buy from the Union shop you will never be on top of lectures. Learn to ‘park’ things (but not too much, you do need to do some work too!).

Challenge of the week: Stereotypes

MBBS Medicine

In Medicine, like many other jobs, we tend to subconsciously stereotype. We rely heavily on pattern recognition for diagnosis, and being a certain age/ sex/ gender is part of that pattern. For example abdominal (tummy) swelling in a 20-30 year old woman has different likely diagnoses that the same swelling in a 70 year old man.

However I was recently challenged about my subconscious stereotypes. I was visiting a HIV clinic in the heart of Soho. When the first patient arrived I found myself surprised- they weren’t the patient I had expected. In fact none of them were.

I saw high flying city workers, happily married couples, internationally renowned performers, hard working shopkeepers and smiling children from all over the world, including many different parts of the U.K.

It’s the small things…

MBBS Medicine

I was upset recently to realise that in the midst of studying I had lost sight of why I went into Medicine.

It’s easy to do. Placements are hectic, stress builds around exams, studying in the library disorientates you and finding opportunities for sign-offs and achieving competencies become your first priority. Recently I found myself stressed in theatre on a Friday afternoon frantically trying to sort out achieving my last competencies on that placement and make sure I had all the paperwork for them sorted.

I was stunned to see the attitude of the student nurse and staff nurse, and how different this was from my own.

Medical Student Syndrome

MBBS Medicine

As term draws on and first years begin to prepare for exams, I thought I would share a few thoughts on Medical Student Syndrome.

Medical Student Syndrome… what is that?

Defined by wikipedia as a condition where medical students students “perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of a disease that they are studying”, this is a very common issue faced by medical students all over the world!

Put simply, when you study a disease for a long time, you begin to persuade yourself that you probably have it and need to go to your GP. However by the time you get to your GP you have forgotten about that disease, and now think you have something else that you are studying.

Elective: They think it’s all over…

MBBS Medicine

Hello! Sorry it has been a while since we last posted- Internet has been very limited in Rushere as the shops had run out of data for our network, and we had spent too much of our data spending money on cups of tea and accidently ringing up the talking clock!

We are now in Entebbe- the town by the airport relaxing before we fly tomorrow afternoon. It is a luxury to be here after the last few weeks – we even have a fan, a TV and fast wifi!

The last couple of weeks at Rushere have been busy. We have enjoyed helping with more theatre cases- one week we had nearly one caesarean and one gynaecological operation a day, which is a lot here- it got to the point where we had nearly run out of clean instruments!

Seven weeks down…

MBBS Medicine

Sorry for the lack of blog posts. We have been having Internet issues. We bought some more data for our modem only to find less than 5 minutes later it had run out (it was to last us a fortnight!)- turns out our Imperial ipad had used all the data to update it’s apps. As a result it is banished to the suitcase! The last couple of weeks here have been interesting.

Medicine-wise we have spent a lot of time in theatre seeing lots of caesarean sections (done to prevent serious problems, not cosmetic!) and a finger amputation!

On the wards we have helped manage lots of challenging cases of malnutrition which at times has been heartbreaking, as well as lots of paediatric and neonatal cases which has been great revision.

Learn more about life at Imperial

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