Nurse B.

and something’s made me laugh (weirdly). Something that keeps cropping up in the articles I’m reading regarding the decision to give palliative care is the ‘surprise test’. This is a sort of unofficial test where the GP of the patient in question considers whether they would ‘be surprised if the patient was still alive in 6-12 months’. 

Is it just me that thinks that that wording is a little bit morbid?

I’m a committee member of the Emergency Medical Society at my uni, and yesterday we teamed up with the Surgical Society and held the National Undergraduate Trauma Conference. What’s that you say? That sounds awesome, what was it? Why, I’ll tell you!

Basically it consisted of a morning of lectures from various consultants and directors about the provision of trauma care across London, including a talk from one of the HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Medical Service) doctors and a doctor who had served in Afghanistan. It was really interesting and made me really think about where I want to go after my nurse training, and all the talks also had a lot of very graphic pictures to illustrate some of the terrible things trauma staff have to manage in their line of work.

In the afternoon everyone went round their choice of 5 out of 8 workshops where they learnt how to do skills such as central line insertion, suturing, emergency trachy insertion, advanced life support, paediatric life support, etc., which were run by some leading medical staff from hospitals around London. 

Highlights of the day for me included:

- Sitting in a room full of 2nd-4th year medical students and answering a question correctly that none of them knew the answer to (behold my enormous brain! Nurse win).

- Free stuff - I got a t-shirt, a milkshake and THREE free Pret A Manger sandwiches. THREE! 

- Seeing some before-and-after photos of some patients who had survived some horrific injuries, showing just how amazing some of the work done by trauma staff can be.

- Hearing that there was a first year student nurse who had travelled down from Birmingham to attend the conference. That’s dedication, people!

Roll on next year!

I had a coffee with a friend of mine who is a 4th-year med student. We were talking about the expectations our mentors had of us during clinical placement.

Him - “I get to do quite a lot, they give us quite a lot of hands-on activities.”

Me - “Ooh, such as?”

Him - “Well, I’ve got to do an injection before. That was pretty exciting.”

Me - “Uh huh…”

Him - “And I put up some fluids once but they don’t really let us do that.”

Me - “Riiiight. Anything else?”

Ok, I know it’s sad, and in terms of medical knowledge and other procedures he’s probably a million light years ahead of me. But still. I could kick his ass at doing injections and putting up fluids. And he also told me he had no idea what a commode was for the whole of his first year. He thought it was a kimono. Roflol.

Small, small things amuse my small mind. Bahahaa. Still funny though. Mini-nursing win!