MiC - Ingleburn and Parramatta / Wednesday, March 24, 2010
I'm past the half-way point of my first trimester this year. (Sounds like I'm preggars, doesn't it?)
Doing Medicine in Context at the moment (shortened to MiC), which is basically the community attachment of my year.
3rd year medicine is split between a community placement, medicine placement and a surgery placement. As I may have explained before, each placement is split between two further attachments, and for MiC, my special topics happened to be 'Ageing' and 'Mental Health'.
Now, that may sound boring to you but 'Ageing' happened to be one of the funnest things I've done in medicine thus far! No jokes! Of course, there wasn't much to it in terms of actual practical medicine, but I was based at Ingleburn Myrtle Cottage, a charity which devotes its time providing day to day activities for the elderly as a form of respite for their carers.
In otherwords, A GIANT DAYCARE CENTRE!
(One for the boys, they had a picture of a Ditto on one of their walls, which I thought was a MASSIVE LOL...and disturbing)
So basically, free food, ALOT of stories (good ones too!), a giant screen to play Wii Bowling, and dare I say it, I think too much pokies and bingo...==
Fun memories, working with members with dementia, and really, they're right about what they say about being old.
1. It really is your second childhood. You seriously act like kids and need help with alot of things. Except loads nicer and love seeing young people.
2. It means your still alive. Average age there: ~80's, 73 is considered young there. o.O
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That attachment is now over, and now I'm based at Parramatta Uniting Care. You may have heard of it or at least seen it around.
A giant white cross with a red dove in the middle against a black circle background.
They're an NGO (is it a NGO or an NGO? I think its a NGO, but it sounds like an 'an' *shrugs*) who works on the behalf of the poorer half of the socioeconomic platform, but is devoted and spread across a large variety of services. Currently, I'm working with their mental health department with David, Keith and Jen. Awesome guys/gal and its good to be working in a team with other meddies (I was getting old by myself at Ingleburn).
The cool thing is that we have the deputy director of the company as our supervisor, Simon, and he seriously puts out a lot of time for us. Being a huge company, Uniting Care is affiliated with a lot of different health initiatives, such as Headspace, Uniting Church, Sydney South West Health Services, Department of Housing and Department of Health etc...
I've been everywhere since this attachment started, and it is seriously a HUGE eye-opener...
Been really hectically busy lately, and kinda deserted my blog for a bit, but after that break, I'll be back (hopefully) to let you know what I'm up to.
P.S: I work with a GP every Thursday now, and I can proudly say that I've given tons of flu shots and taken lots of bloods from people with skill. =)
Also managed to do a real breast examination (hi5*) and a real pap smear (awful experience...i'm traumatised), as well as a testicular examination (but nobody needs to know about that) =)
More updates next time.
Dr. Cambridge (as I have been called by some patients XD)
Labels: medicine
/because of my high tolerance.
12:19:00 AM
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