A Year in the Highlands
As part of the ScotGEM course, a year is spent undertaking a longitudinal integrated clerkship. I chose to come to the Highlands and wanted to be near Inverness, and I was assigned my practice in Tain. Before starting the course I had only been to Scotland twice, had never even heard of Tain, and didn’t know what to expect. Our course has an emphasis on general practice, and before starting my LIC I had enjoyed my GP placements but wasn’t sure if I would be better suited to secondary care. My main concern was that general practice meant working alone and I would miss working in a team. I also worried that there would be a lot of referring in general practice which meant not seeing a patient’s journey in secondary care. On a more general note, I was concerned that a career in medicine meant sacrificing hobbies and interests.