Med students unprepared for real world

The federal government has released its report What makes for success in medical education? into "how well [medical education in Australia] prepares graduates for their work as interns and meets the requirements of postgraduate training for future medical career".

Only 29% of medical students felt competent to accurately calculate drug doses, 48% ready to write a prescription, 66% ready to take arterial blood gasses.

In a related note, we have a two-hour seminar on Friday "Greenhouse by the Bedside: Climate Change and Health".

Abomination

The biology library and the hospital library have replaced all their student-access machines with shiny new Macintosh desktops. Running Windows. Philistines!

Moderation

I have had to turn on comment moderation, some clowns are using blog comment areas as yet another place to spam people.

Reset, rewind...

About October last year I fell in a hole. The hole is called major depression^[1]. I was completely flat emotionally, I could not sleep properly (I was getting less hours in a week than I should be in a night), I could not concentrate, and I literally spent days lying in my bed doing nothing^[2]. My doctor put me on anti-depressants and after some fiddling with drug and dose I am mostly back to my old self.

The school was very good about it; I was allowed to withdraw without academic or financial penalty and re-enrol for second year again in 2010. So reset, rewind, tomorrow is the first day of second year...

[1] Yay!, I'm not even a doctor yet and already I have a serious illness named after me
[2] The difference between major depression and major laziness is subtle but real

Progressive outer retinal necrosis

Try searching for that using the acronym ;-)

Wunch

I learned a new word yesterday. "Wunch" is a collective noun for people from the finance business. As in "a wunch of bankers".

So thats why

On Monday we had a lecture from a Royal Children's Hospital radiologist on fractures in children. He prefaced his remarks by saying that fractures in children were very common because, as you can see from the RCH Logo, children have very thin arms and legs.

Yay!

Amanda's comment is right on the money and I should not be wasting time writing another blog post, but (1) I mentioned the process so I should really follow up and (2) I am busting out of my skin to tell someone; so...

I got Bundy!

My clinical school for next year is Bundaberg and my first rotation is medicine (also my first choice).

So, I now have one more motivation to do well, I might not be so lucky next year if I have to repeat.