The lockdown Silver-Lining
By Luke Ottewell, 4th Year Medicine, University of Bristol
This morning I logged into my first virtual meeting since starting medical school. Zoom — this will serve as news to no-one — is quite simply an absolute game-changer. However, it brings with it a whole new risk to the world of medical education.
As I sat at my desk, at my parent’s home, with a cup of coffee, with a cat on my lap, with the central-heating on and with the sun shining, I said to myself “well this is simply swell”. I am unused to the luxuries that home life is affording me. I would usually have had to drag myself out of my cold, freezing student house into the even colder outside, brave the wind and the rain, which my umbrella simply is not fit for, into a dark hospital side-room which smells quite odd and definitely is not big enough for all of us. And after 50 minutes of being spoken to, I’d have to battle to find somewhere to sit and plan how to do the next series of seemingly random hoop-jumping that the medical school has asked me to do. Instead, after the meeting ended I simply hung-up, exhaled in utter delight and started the new set of tasks I must do in order to graduate. All, virtually.
By the end of the next few hours or so, I had written a whole presentation on subgaleal haemorrhages, made some quite tricky notes on something or other and put time aside to learn all this new content. I felt quite accomplished and in possession of some knowledge that I did not have a few hours ago.
This all roused in me a sense of disappointment in how medicine is currently taught. There is a lot of emphasis on case-based learning, on consultation skills, on reflection, on asking for endless amounts of signatures to consultants who have just given you a few hours of the company (turns out, asking them for a signature to prove your attendance is the number-one way to disappoint them). And yet no time whatsoever, not even a suggestion, that we should go home and learn what we’ve just been taught to the letter until we are reciting it in our sleep. This is how we’ll ultimately be examined. Lo and behold, when the end of year comes, we all regret not memorising that drug, this mechanism, that syndrome, when we first came across it.
When I leave this lockdown period, I can tell you that I will know the theory so very well. Ask me any mechanism, any eponymous syndrome, and I’ll tell you. The side-effects of drugs will simply roll off my tongue, and I will be an absolute prodigy at interpreting x-rays. But, on my first day back into the hospital, when I am confronted with a genuinely ill patient, all of this will dissipate. I will be overcome by the sounds, the smells of the ward and the sights of patient’s loved ones. As I start my first clerking since returning to the wards, nearly five years after I started it, my heart will beat so hard, and my hands will start to shake. For I will have lost the human touch.
I hope that, out of this time of crisis, we in the medical community learn something about how best we learn. I’m sure that many of us will have realised how useful it is to have the time to deep-learn all those details we’ve been wanting to drill for years. Perhaps we will realise that some of the things we are asked to do in order to progress at medical school are not that useful. The pandemic has been so devastating in so many ways, but for me it has one small silver-lining: in a few months from now, I will be so excited to meet another patient. The feeling of cannulating again will feel all that more satisfying. I will once again have to hold down my smile when I’m asked if I would like to scrub-in. The sight of a baby being born will once more move me to tears.
On that day in which we return to hospitals, in our sharply-ironed shirts and polished shoes, with our best haircuts and neatest nails, we will again have that feeling which originally inspired us to become doctors.
