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Student Stories

ScotGEM’s first Wild Trials!

ScotGEM’s first wild trials experience, where they undertook various emergency and wilderness medicine scenarios as a team in a competition with 23 other medical schools across the UK.

Obstetrics in the Arctic

Amber chose to go to Norway for her elective placement in her final year of ScotGEM, to the city of Tromsø, in the north of Norway. She got to experience medicine in the Arctic, from skiing to work, sweet treats to celebrate the return of the sun and refreshing dips in the arctic waters!

My South African Elective

I am a final year ScotGEM student and this year international electives are finally back up and running! For my first block I was lucky enough to be able to go back to South Africa…

Ushering in a new era for ScotGEM stories

Hello from your new team of editors at ScotGEM stories! To start off the 2022/2023 academic year we thought we would introduce ourselves so you all know a little bit about us and why we chose ScotGEM.

Graduation

Graduation! It’s hard to believe that it’ll be happening just a couple of weeks from now. It feels like it was just the other day when fifty-five eager new ScotGEMs took a seat in one of the seminar rooms at the School of Medicine in St Andrews for our first induction session, getting over a different dose of disbelief that we’d been given a place in the inaugural cohort of the first ever graduate-entry, accelerated medical degree programme in Scotland.

photo of medical professionals wearing personal protective equipment

Pass Me The Needle

Having travelled two and a half hours from my rural LIC (longitudinal integrated clerkship) GP practice, I arrived at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, bright-eyed and eager to learn.

yellow helicopter

An Emergency in the Hills

I had never really given much thought to how my first experience of delivering CPR would go, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be out on the hills, without a phone signal or a single piece of kit.

One Newspaper Later…

Time flies when you are whizzing about every corner of Scotland for four years, but not so much when you’re waiting for a bus in sub-zero temperatures in the middle of the Highlands. Need to learn to drive ASAP.

West is Best

If you don’t believe me, Princess Anne once said, “Sailing on a sunny day in Scotland is the nearest thing to heaven anyone will ever get on this earth…” She should know, with her near 30-year experience sailing her 44-foot yacht around Scotland every summer.

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.

Ben Nevis

My third year on placement in Fort William has so far been brilliant. The people who I have met and worked with have taken every opportunity to demonstrate their kindness and generosity. However, I think most of us would admit that at times this year has been tough. We have all had to make the most of what we have around us. This year of all years I have tried to embrace the opportunities afforded to me by the beautiful west coast, and I really could not have asked for more out of my time here.

My Helicopter Ride

Hi, I’m Liepa and I am only an honorary member of ScotGEM. As I am the only Dundee undergrad doing the longitudinal integrated clerkship (LIC) programme in Scotland this year, I have been unofficially initiated into the ScotGEM tribe.
Week 1 of ScotGEM was a blur, meeting all those new and fabulous people… but one thing I do remember clearly is someone official saying: “You are not allowed to ride in emergency or medical helicopters.”

Aberfeldy

This is the verbal picture of my living in rural Aberfeldy for the past four months. Before we delve in, if you prefer just looking at pretty pictures please go and view my friend Alistair McDonald’s previous Tiree post. If ScotGEM Stories were a book (million pound idea!) his would be on the front cover.

city landmark water building

Simulation

Last week, the students of ScotGEM’s Year 3 currently based within NHS Highland got together (in an orderly, socially-distanced manner) for some in-person tutorials and clinical simulations at the Centre for Health Science in Inverness.

Wick-ed: A Day in the Life of Joe

Hi, my name is Joe. I’m one of those pesky third year ScotGEM students currently out on placement in a remote corner of Scotland. It is a place that is teeming with fabulous wildlife – I have made many a friend among the local seals during my wild swims along the coast. They clearly thought I was one of them. The place I’m in is Wick. I thought it would be nice to pen a ScotGEM story about a day in Caithness General Hospital, which is to be found bang in the centre of the town. It’s a real do-it-all hospital—from managing the most acute cases, to dealing with a cataclysmic road traffic accident, to helping a frail and elderly patient back into their home in the community, it does it all.

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