Keele GP Placements Student Video

We started our experience in GP in our preclinical years, where we had one or two days a year of online remote GP placements, where they brought in a patient, one of us took a history, and then we presented back to the GP and discussed it as a group.

We've had four weeks GP placement in year three and then another four weeks in year four, and then in year five we’ll have a 10-week GP placement.

When we had them, it was a few days of observing clinics from doctors, nurses, phlebotomists and seeing how they all work, and then after that we'd have our own clinics. So morning and afternoon clinics where we'd speak to our own patients, have a bit of a chat to them, take a history, examine, and then we'd go and report to the doctor.

GP placements have allowed me to see patients as they first present, and to formulate a diagnosis based on the history that I've taken and the examination that I've done, and then to be able to discuss this with the GP tutor and go over the management that they would receive rather than just seeing them once they've already presented to the hospital and are admitted to a ward.

Being in GP and having GP placements, it sort of gives us a feel for Community Medicine, which we don't always get exposed to, and it sort of gives us a feel for a different environment - a different working environment within the NHS.

I think the GP's really helped me to develop my history taking process, and really build on my clinical reasoning skills.

I think because you get to see so many different presentations, so many different cases in one day, and they're so varied, I think you just learn a lot more in such a short space of time. And because you have to do the whole process of the history taking, the examination, the management plan—everything like that - I think you get to see the whole process in that one 10-minute consultation, which is really good.

The cluster sessions, I found, were really useful, because we could spend a bit more time presenting cases, discussing cases, and think more behind the rationale of some of the decisions that the doctors and the other staff had made for certain cases, which—because we've got that bit more amount of time - it allowed us to have that discussion and ask more questions which we wouldn't have really been able to do in the GP setting.

The DCS sessions were a really good way to consolidate the week's key learning points and to share cases and learning experiences with students that were at other GP practices.

I found that it made the experience much more enjoyable for me if the GP tutors were patient and welcoming and willing to discuss each case in a fair amount of detail, and tell you ways that you could improve and ways that you have improved over the blocks.

I think GP Tutors, if they welcome you to the team and introduce you to the rest of the team, it just makes you feel more welcome and that will make you more likely to seek additional opportunities and things like that in the practice, which I think is always really good.

I also found that it helped when GPs had a special interest, like a day or clinic where I could see a lot of specific cases that I may not have seen otherwise.

All the practices I've been to so far have been really friendly and it's definitely made me want to pursue a career in general practice.