Choosing a career

In response to Kingmagic’s comment:

When the time came to apply to university I was choosing between medicine and paramedic science/practise. I chose medicine and I’ve always questioned whether I made the right decision. I’m really interested in pre-hospital care - I find I can read journal articles and books about new advances, treatments, case reports etc and it doesn’t feel like I’m working, its actually interesting. There are not many topics that I can say that about. I have experience of working in the pre-hospital arena through voluntary work and my part-time job and I love it.

Recent experiences have allowed me to reason with myself that I did make the right choice all those years ago. We have modules in our course that we can self design in order to explore career options and do placements of particular interest. I spent my option module with the local ambulance service.

In those 6 weeks I spent time on frontline vehicles, on an RRV, and with ECP’s and it was great. I learnt a lot, appreciated just how hard the job you guys do is and how good you have to be at it. But I also came to the conclusion that it is not the career for me. I found it very soul destroying to be going to jobs where a 999 response wasn’t really necessary and the monotony of chest pains started to grate, as much as I enjoyed it I don’t think I could have done it forever. The few really interesting jobs, the traumas, the ones where you really had to think about what was going on, it wasn’t enough to counterbalance the rest.

I’m doing my intercalated year in pre-hospital medicine; one of my supervisors is the medical director of the local ambulance service. I don’t have my project fully sorted yet but it’s looking like being something related to the development of the paramedic practitioner role or reducing the workload of 999 ambulance services. I’m really looking forward to this coming year – less so to the dissertation and viva at the end.

Career-wise, I’m left with acute medicine in a hospital setting, be it in A&E, acute admissions or elsewhere, I’m hoping that as I do more specialised placement one of these areas will stick out as the one for me. Anyway, with MMC, MTAS and the job application system the way it is I’ll probably end up working in dermatology in Scotland!

(The novelty of blue lights and sirens didn’t wear off over the 6 week ambulance placement; I still found it childishly fun going through red lights and on the wrong side of the road. I’m sure it’s not that entertaining for you lot from the drivers seat though).

Stay safe (especially those people working tonight looking after all the drunken revellers on the UK’s streets and A&E departments)

SD