TSR Med Students' Society Part V

Me: So Mr PVD, do you have any history of heart disease?

Mr PVD: Nope!

Me: May I ask what that scar on your chest is please?

Mr PVD: Oh that's from the heart attack and triple bypass which I had last year.



Do patients genuinely forget that they've had MIs or is it my method of questioning which is at fault here?

(Later asked him if he had COPD which he denied - turns out 60 cigarettes a day and his medical notes begged to differ )

(Later asked him if he had COPD which he denied - turns out 60 cigarettes a day and his medical notes begged to differ )

Asking open questions is almost universally a fruitless endeavour, despite what the communications skills sessions preach.

To be fair, most people up here don't know they have COPD - those that allude to a chest condition think they either have asthma or emphysema (which is what COPD what used to be diagnosed as x years ago).

Psych OSCE was weird. 4 stations, I got distinction level marks on two of them, scraped through one and failed one. Overall pass but it's alarming because I can't remember feeling any different coming out of the stations I nailed compared to the one I ballsed up.

Having been a 'patient' for clinical exams it become increasingly obvious that who you examiner is makes almost as much difference as you ability.

So, Aston Uni have just announced they're setting up a med school. 20 places for local students from disadvantaged backgrounds, on scholarship, and 80 places for fee-paying internationals. Five year MBChB with an inbuilt "mini-MBA". Thoughts?

I'd have thought the Bham area had quite enough students floating around without more to find hospitals for. Looks like Bucks is setting a trend for the rise of small private schools though.

An extra 20 students per year? That's, what, 0.0002% of the average B'ham year-group? Barely makes a ripple.

EDIT: didn't read the 80 internationals properly. Yeah, that might make a ripple.

Birmingham don't do too well on distributing us evenly throughout the west mids. I was in tiny DGH for my main 5th year block with 16 other students, whilst there were on 20 at the QE, so I reckon they could squeeze in a few more. The Birmingham year group has decreased slightly in recent years too iirc.

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More small, private medical schools is exactly what we don't need. Bucks were taking the piss as it is.

So, Aston Uni have just announced they're setting up a med school. 20 places for local students from disadvantaged backgrounds, on scholarship, and 80 places for fee-paying internationals. Five year MBChB with an inbuilt "mini-MBA". Thoughts?

I'd have thought the Bham area had quite enough students floating around without more to find hospitals for. Looks like Bucks is setting a trend for the rise of small private schools though.

First day of 5th year and everybody has really upped their freebies game. Got an Oxford Handbook of Acute Medicine from MPS, Oxford Medical flashcards from the MDU and a £10 Amazon voucher from the BMA. If I'd signed up to Wesleyan too then it would have been rounded out with a mini-Kumar.


That all does very little to assuage the existential terror that comes from being in final year.

I chose these and bitterly regretted it. They're not flashcards at all. They're just cards with information on them: no question-answer format. It's basically a less comfortable version of a book.

Think I saw something in the BMJ recently that they'd managed to recruit something pathetic like 30 students, but were still hoping to get over 100 by September by preying on the kids in Clearing