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announcement!
I'm high on singing-vibes from an excellent combined choir & orchestra Carmina rehearsal, and I had a couple of emergency naps earlier today, so I'm surprisingly chirpy for 10:20pm. I have a hell of a lot of work to do but this post needs to be made sooner or later, so.
The short version is: I'm going rural for 2011.
The long version is this: one of the ways the Australian Government tries to entice its newly-minted doctors to work in areas of need (mostly rural areas) is by throwing money at medical schools to allow them to provide a good amount of training in rural medicine. The University of Sydney has rural campuses in Dubbo and Orange (both small towns in NSW), meaning that there is on-site accommodation for students and a clinical school attached to each hospital. In return for the funding for these sits, the graduate medical program has to send a certain proportion of its Commonwealth-supported students (ie. not full-fee-paying -- a dying breed anyway thanks to KRudd -- or international students) to spend a year of their degree in a rural training school.
The first few years the rural stream was run, it was unpopular, but the faculty has started offering the Discovery Bus Tours (weekends where students can visit the towns & campuses, and talk to current students, and find out more about the stream) and now the rural option is so oversubscribed that a ballot system has to be used to choose who goes. Students are either there for third or fourth year, as these are the two entirely hospital-based teaching years.
I went on the Disco Bus earlier this year, largely because I was...curious. I'm such a devotedly big-city girl, currently training at an enormous big-city hospital, and I've never lived in the country. I'm still not thrilled at the prospect. But by all accounts the teaching is excellent -- much smaller class sizes and far fewer senior staff around, so you get a lot more hands-on experience than you do at the urban clinical schools. There's less choice when it comes to medical rotations, but you do still get a year at your urban hospital, so variety shouldn't be a problem. The accommodation is free (!!!), you share a house with other students in your year, and it's basically next door to the clinical school. Based largely on the hospital and my desire to break up my Sydney years, I decided to preferentially think about Dubbo 2010.
However, the ballot system is CRAZILY COMPLEX, due to the necessity of allocating a certain number of people from each urban clinical school to each rural centre for each year, and it was run as a simple 'once your name is pulled out of the hat (literally. a hat.) you choose your spot'. We sat in a room while this happened and people had to revise their options frantically based on which spots got snapped up where and by what people.
LONG STORY SHORT: when my name was pulled out, a Dubbo 2010 spot was still available, but due to a handful of reasons...I picked Orange 2011 instead. I was unsure about it for a while but it's working out quite nicely -- two of my best friends in the course, K and N, also got spots in Orange that year. And Orange is a much nicer town than Dubbo; it's got lovely bakeries and is near a heap of wineries and orchards (gourmet food festivals ahoy!), and is just prettier. Also, according to Wikipedia, Orange is one of the few cities in Australia to receive reasonably frequent snowfalls in winter, which is completely awesome because I have never lived somewhere snowy!
ALSO, and this is exciting, Orange has the Bloomfield Hospital, which is a huge centre for rural and remote mental health, and the rural coordinator has said that she can try to get me a timetable whereby I can do my psych term in Orange (AND get it done before my elective term, which will hopefully also be in psych).
The upshot being that my 2010/2011 will probably look something like this:
2010
Sydney
Jan 18 - TERM A: Medicine (probably 2 x 4-week placements in eg. neurology, cardio, renal, etc.)
Mar 22 - TERM B: Surgery (again, 2 x 4-week placements)
May 24 - TERM C: Community medicine (a GP placement)
Jul 26 - TERM D: Perinatal & women's health (BABIES!!)
Sep 27 - BARRIER EXAM
followed by a move to...
Orange
Oct 12 - TERM E: Psychological & addiction medicine (\o/)
2011
December 7-March 22 - HOLIDAY & ELECTIVE TERM
(Basically you can choose to do one 8-week elective or 2 x 4-week electives, in any kind of medicine, anywhere you like. I am not sure what I'll do, yet -- I'd love to go overseas but a lot of the hospitals in America and England charge shitloads of money for elective terms. I'm looking at other options including some GP work in indigenous communities and some excellent mental health projects being run in Australian cities, but I have a while to work it out.)
Mar 22 - TERM F: Child & adolescent health
May 24 - TERM G: Critical care (emergency, anaesthetics & intensive care)
Jul 26 - TERM H: Medicine (as for the first medicine term in Sydney, though probably a lot more general)
And then I think there's probably another BARRIER EXAM (ew) and a short holiday before which I somehow have to have found accommodation back in...
Sydney
October 11-December 6 - PRE-INTERNSHIP
2012
I START WORK AS A FUCKING DOCTOR. I'll know where by July of 2011, at least.
~
So yeah. That's it. I think (and my parents agree) it'll be really good for me to get out of my city-loving comfort zone -- Orange has a population of around 30,000 -- I grew up in Canberra (pop. 300,000) and currently live in Sydney (pop. 4.5 million). The medicine will be different, the people will be different, the life will be different.
I'm excited :)
The short version is: I'm going rural for 2011.
The long version is this: one of the ways the Australian Government tries to entice its newly-minted doctors to work in areas of need (mostly rural areas) is by throwing money at medical schools to allow them to provide a good amount of training in rural medicine. The University of Sydney has rural campuses in Dubbo and Orange (both small towns in NSW), meaning that there is on-site accommodation for students and a clinical school attached to each hospital. In return for the funding for these sits, the graduate medical program has to send a certain proportion of its Commonwealth-supported students (ie. not full-fee-paying -- a dying breed anyway thanks to KRudd -- or international students) to spend a year of their degree in a rural training school.
The first few years the rural stream was run, it was unpopular, but the faculty has started offering the Discovery Bus Tours (weekends where students can visit the towns & campuses, and talk to current students, and find out more about the stream) and now the rural option is so oversubscribed that a ballot system has to be used to choose who goes. Students are either there for third or fourth year, as these are the two entirely hospital-based teaching years.
I went on the Disco Bus earlier this year, largely because I was...curious. I'm such a devotedly big-city girl, currently training at an enormous big-city hospital, and I've never lived in the country. I'm still not thrilled at the prospect. But by all accounts the teaching is excellent -- much smaller class sizes and far fewer senior staff around, so you get a lot more hands-on experience than you do at the urban clinical schools. There's less choice when it comes to medical rotations, but you do still get a year at your urban hospital, so variety shouldn't be a problem. The accommodation is free (!!!), you share a house with other students in your year, and it's basically next door to the clinical school. Based largely on the hospital and my desire to break up my Sydney years, I decided to preferentially think about Dubbo 2010.
However, the ballot system is CRAZILY COMPLEX, due to the necessity of allocating a certain number of people from each urban clinical school to each rural centre for each year, and it was run as a simple 'once your name is pulled out of the hat (literally. a hat.) you choose your spot'. We sat in a room while this happened and people had to revise their options frantically based on which spots got snapped up where and by what people.
LONG STORY SHORT: when my name was pulled out, a Dubbo 2010 spot was still available, but due to a handful of reasons...I picked Orange 2011 instead. I was unsure about it for a while but it's working out quite nicely -- two of my best friends in the course, K and N, also got spots in Orange that year. And Orange is a much nicer town than Dubbo; it's got lovely bakeries and is near a heap of wineries and orchards (gourmet food festivals ahoy!), and is just prettier. Also, according to Wikipedia, Orange is one of the few cities in Australia to receive reasonably frequent snowfalls in winter, which is completely awesome because I have never lived somewhere snowy!
ALSO, and this is exciting, Orange has the Bloomfield Hospital, which is a huge centre for rural and remote mental health, and the rural coordinator has said that she can try to get me a timetable whereby I can do my psych term in Orange (AND get it done before my elective term, which will hopefully also be in psych).
The upshot being that my 2010/2011 will probably look something like this:
2010
Sydney
Jan 18 - TERM A: Medicine (probably 2 x 4-week placements in eg. neurology, cardio, renal, etc.)
Mar 22 - TERM B: Surgery (again, 2 x 4-week placements)
May 24 - TERM C: Community medicine (a GP placement)
Jul 26 - TERM D: Perinatal & women's health (BABIES!!)
Sep 27 - BARRIER EXAM
followed by a move to...
Orange
Oct 12 - TERM E: Psychological & addiction medicine (\o/)
2011
December 7-March 22 - HOLIDAY & ELECTIVE TERM
(Basically you can choose to do one 8-week elective or 2 x 4-week electives, in any kind of medicine, anywhere you like. I am not sure what I'll do, yet -- I'd love to go overseas but a lot of the hospitals in America and England charge shitloads of money for elective terms. I'm looking at other options including some GP work in indigenous communities and some excellent mental health projects being run in Australian cities, but I have a while to work it out.)
Mar 22 - TERM F: Child & adolescent health
May 24 - TERM G: Critical care (emergency, anaesthetics & intensive care)
Jul 26 - TERM H: Medicine (as for the first medicine term in Sydney, though probably a lot more general)
And then I think there's probably another BARRIER EXAM (ew) and a short holiday before which I somehow have to have found accommodation back in...
Sydney
October 11-December 6 - PRE-INTERNSHIP
2012
I START WORK AS A FUCKING DOCTOR. I'll know where by July of 2011, at least.
~
So yeah. That's it. I think (and my parents agree) it'll be really good for me to get out of my city-loving comfort zone -- Orange has a population of around 30,000 -- I grew up in Canberra (pop. 300,000) and currently live in Sydney (pop. 4.5 million). The medicine will be different, the people will be different, the life will be different.
I'm excited :)
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I'm so terribly excited for you!! :D
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Do you get much choice over intern placement in NSW? Vic was pretty much supply/demand, but I worked with a few USyd grads who said they didn't get as much choice north of the border.
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All of which is ages away! Anyway, I'm sure the Orange experience will be awesome (getting to do critical care will be great too. We got A+E but never into ICU).
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I'm so excited, if I were a nail-biter, I would be biting my nails with excitement!
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It's interesting to me, because most of my childhood was spent in very small towns in the US and, since I've tended to live in larger cities (and can't imagine going back to a small town, but that's probably because it's where I came from). I do think the small town experience is something that can't really be replicated and is certainly interesting for those who've lived most of their lives in cities -- it's very intimate.
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Congrats on getting the rural placement you wanted - it sounds like you have a killer clerkship schedule, which is awesome. I'm glad you're excited. :)
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this program/timetable looks like an incredible experience. i'm so excited for you! if you did go overseas for that elective period, where exactly would you be interested in going in america/england?
this is just too cool. go, fahye, go!
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We got 16 weeks for ours (the good old days - 1998!) and I spent 8 weeks of that in Sydney, staying at Ryde Hospital and based at a Developmental Disabilities centre. (I've checked my journal and I first name check all the people but never mention the full name or location of the centre!)
I had a great time, both socially, as a tourist AND medically. I'm fairly sure that if I had not seen the light (Emergency medicine!) my time in Sydney would have still been useful to me today.
Your placements sound excellent and I bet you'll see and do some really interesting things in Orange, smaller hospitals always do tend towards allowing everyone to be more hands on. And everyone knows everyone, which is mainly a good thing.
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I totally need a Medicine icon now.