Making the Most of Your Clinical Placements

Look After Yourself  

The most important element to ensuring that you make the most out of your placement is looking after yourself. As a medical student it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the various emotional challenges that are commonplace during clinical placements, such as confronting patients’ illness and death, attempting challenging new skills and developing professionally. It is helpful to allocate time within the week to relax and perhaps attend a few society events. You could even start a new hobby.   

It can be useful to speak to friends and family for support. Additionally, talking to doctors can prove to be valuable as they are best placed to give you advice on how they have dealt with the stresses of medical school.  

Having a good regime for stress relief is essential. It can support you in benefiting from placements by increasing your concentration, capacity to make decisions and ability to establish strong professional relationships. 

Devise a plan 

Before placement, devise a plan outlining what you wish to learn for the day. You can take objectives from exam specifications to ensure that you are targeting your learning. Sharing that plan with your supervisor can facilitate you meeting your objectives as they can often point you in the direction of patients that have particular signs or offer you teaching if they have time. Whilst on placement you can identify doctors that have undertaken specialist training and can often arrange to sit in on their clinics.  

Clinical placements are a great opportunity to put into practice what you have learnt. Use your time to practice history taking, examinations and clinical skills. Getting feedback from peers or a clinical supervisor is a great way to learn how to improve. Aim to learn at least one new piece of knowledge, be it practical or medical theory, per day as this can help to breakdown the workload.  

Volunteer  

It is common for medical students to refrain from performing clinical skills, such as histories and examinations, due to fears that they may be incorrect. Such opportunities are a great learning experience as they are quite similar to OSCE scenarios. Additionally, you can receive feedback on your performance to help you improve in the future. Taking advantage of these opportunities helps you to build your confidence in a clinical setting.    

Attend Junior Doctor Teaching   

Often there is opportunity for medical students attending clinical placements to attend junior doctor teaching. The teaching often centres around topics that are relevant to the medical school curriculum and prove to be useful in providing a clinical context to the medical knowledge.  

This is also a great way to make friends with the junior doctors! They are the ones who have most recently finished medical school and so they are familiar with your experiences. They can offer you teaching on medical concepts but also on things beyond the curriculum, such as career decisions. Additionally, there is a chance to gain a mentor, be offered research opportunities (such as audits) and start to form your network.   

Reflect  

Reflect on what you have learnt during your clinical placements at regular intervals. At medical school you learn clinical knowledge but also the professional skills that shape you into the doctor that you become. Reflection helps you to make the most out of your everyday experiences, learning what actions were successful and perhaps occasionally what actions were not, in order to guide your future practice to shape you into becoming the best doctor you can be. Reflection can also be a useful tool in helping you to devise daily plans!  

Finally, enjoy your clinical years – they are a wonderful learning journey and are truly the highlight of medical school. Make sure that you seize every opportunity and put into practice all of the knowledge that you have learnt!  

Good luck for all of your placements!  

Amaal Maqsood-Shah