Medicine Admin Folk Need Better Language/People Skills

Some time back, the final year students of the YLL SoM received an email from the Dean’s Office. It started with,
“I am pleased to inform you that there will be a briefing for all M5 students on M5 specific matters on [Day of Week] [Date] from [Time] to [Time + 1hr]. in Lecture Theatre [...]

SIP: Nursing Staff

Without nursing staff, patient care could not reasonably be expected to occur. Besides the usual recordings, drips, bloods, drug calculation and administration, the nurses are the first people to note when a patient needs medical attention.
Like any other profession, the individuals in the nursing profession run the gamut of competency.
Fortunately for J., the nursing staff [...]

SIP: Call Superstitions

The day before my next call, I thought I’d focus on an article that appeared in Weekend Today on Saturday.

Bath or bao makes or breaks one’s day
It focuses on an humourous article published in the Annals of Academic Medicine by a team of NUH physicians, including the well-known A/Prof Erle Lim, consultant neurologist and Prof [...]

Not Quite SIP – Patient Sensitivity

Perhaps it’s a Singaporean thing, but Singaporean patients seem to be exquisitely sensitive to comments.
Of course, there are the occasional incredibly trusting patients that make J. feel guilt-ridden to the core. Such as the youngish Indian man who called all the medical team “Sir” though the SIP students and even the A/Con requested that he [...]

Medicine SIP – The First Call

It’s nice that as a medical student, one still has no real responsibilities. So for the first call, J. tagged along with the house officer (HO) from the team he’s attached to.
Life as HO1-on-call at this particular hospital is shit.
The MO on call pointed out that the year as a house officer is a shit [...]

Software – Foxit PDF Reader

There are many documents that are sent out in PDF form, including medical journal articles, making it essential for everybody to have a PDF reader on their computer. For most, this would mean Adobe Reader but this is one of the biggest pieces of bloatware around. When J. first started it, he had to contend [...]

Medicine SIP – The 1st Week

Disclaimer: J. is very tired and is therefore not in a normal state of mind. Anything he types in this entry should not be held against him. You wouldn’t do that to a tired medical student, would you? Would you?
J. was posted to the Gastroenterology ward of a major hospital in Singapore for his medical [...]

Review: Delhi Restaurant

CG Lunch No. 1
It’s incredible. For J.’s clinical group (CG), there has not been a single clinical group outing with every member (numbering 8 in total) present for over a year. The closest they’ve come is a dim sum buffet with 7 present. In stark contrast, less than 2 weeks into their new posting, the [...]

The Lie of “Keep an Open Mind”

For a period of time, J. felt guilty that he did not believe certain things others seemed to believe/told him to believe because he was not “open-minded” enough. Then one day, he realised he wasn’t “close-minded”, he just wasn’t convinced.
What does it mean to be open-minded? Dictionary.com defines open-minded as:
1. having or showing a mind receptive [...]

Categories of ‘Patients’ in one Clinical Group

During a review session on diabetes melltius, the students learnt that while there’s an ideal level of care to aim towards, most patients lie within one of four categories:
1. Premium Independent Care
2. Independent Care
3. Basic Care
4. Don’t Care
Heh. The last category is a bit of an attempt to inject humour into this classification system. This [...]