extra stuff for medics Watch

hey guys

Im a second year medical student, and my friends (mostly postgrads) are always up to stuff, be it going abroad for medical courses paid in full, or surgery courses. my question is, is there a place where i can find out about the availability of things such as this? like courses/sessions/extra stuff. its just that I'm really interested in it but i never get told about it. before anyone says ask your friends where they do, i know they find out in various places around my uni website, but I'm just wondering whether theres another place/website/group who do these things

thanks

There isn't a central place, as everything in medicine most things are split into associations/societies that advertise most things relevant to the audience of a particular society. There's likely local societies that will advertise stuff that's occurring locally as well as big things nationally and that's the best first port of call. Surgical society if you're interested in surgery etc. or specific specialty societies if you're interested in a specialty.

Nationally, more generally there is the Royal Society of Medicine which is a membership association that runs events that may or may not be relevant to you. There's ASME, Assosciation for the Study of Medical Education (and JASME, the Junior...) for MedEd type stuff and the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management for quality improvement, leadership, etc. stuff.

Increasingly there are national undergraduate specialty-specific societies (British Undergraduae Cardiovascular Society springs to mind) and these commonly now have national student meetings and events. A fair few medical schools also have academic medicine societies (Academic Medicine Society at Newcastle, ATRIUM at Edinburgh, etc) and these run national conferences that you can attend. There's also NSAMR, the National Student Assosciation for Medical Research, which vaguely acts as an umbrella over all academic medicine societies and has a national conference each year (which really is just a local academic medicine society conference with extra branding - last two years were Newcastle in 2014 and Cardiff in 2015).

There's also big international conferences that are held by the big societies (British Cardiovascular Socieity for example - good conference for students interested in cardio research) that may or may not be relevant if that's the kind of jazz you're interested in. The European Society of Cardiology meeting this year is in London, which is convienent.

The Royal College of Surgeons does loads and loads, but I don't really know much about that - the Royal College of Physicians has some stuff as well.

That's all just from the top of my head from stuff I've been involved in. It really does depend on what your interests are. There are specialty-specific and there's general but most stuff is organised through societies.

Although sometimes there's a discounted student rate, conferences often cost quite a bit to attend and often the bursaries are limited to speciality trainees. As an example, the ESC conference this year in London costs between 600 to 880 euros depending on when you book it...no bursaries and no student rates