Doing medicine as an oldie

For the first time, I have butterlies in my stomach today! I am excited about having the chance to go to do medicine. I have my fingers crossed that things will work out with my dad and am going to keep planning with a view to being able to take my place in September.

Money is a big factor - have been looking at a professional studies loan from the HSBC so that I can pay off my debts before starting. These loans allow you to defer payments until back in the world of work but the cost is massive. If you borrow the maximum of £25,000, the repayments work out around 400 per month for eight years. Scary!

I have had a few emails from people who have read my blog (It's a nice feeling to think that someone would want to plough through these posts) asking how an oldie gets into medicine. If any of you have been watching the recent ITV programme "Vital Signs", you will be under the assumption that one day you can wake up, decide to be a doctor, walk into the nearest medical school and ask for a place!




Hmmmmm.....today I am going to be a doctor!



If only this were the case.....getting into medicine as an oldie in a labour of love and much jumping through hoops is needed, although there certainly more opportunites than there were ten years ago. I qualified as a nurse in the mid nineties and went to Kings College to complete my nursing degree. One day, I knocked on the dean's door to speak to him about becoming a medical student. He laughed at me - no joke! His words were along the line that in his experience, nurses struggled to do medicine and so he would not be happy to consider me (He was eating an egg sandwich as he said this and at one point he spat some egg onto my sleeve)
I remember walking out feeling like shite on his shoe and pretty much come back to Wales with my tail between my legs.

Anyway, then it was unusual for schools to look at non-traditional students but now things have changed. There are opportunites for older students from non-traditional backgrounds, but the competition is fierce. I found out most of my information on two helpful internet forums:

http://www.admissionsforum.co.uk/

http://www.newmediamedicine.com/forum/

There are two options for the oldie wanting to study medicine:

• Applying to medical school for a traditional five year course (Will need A Levels or degree or access course)
• Applying to one of the newer Graduate entry programmes (GEPs) A 2:1 degree is normally needed, unless it is one of the schools that use the dreaded GAMSAT test - you can apply for these schools with a 2:2. Georges and Notts use GAMSAT - not sure if any others do

Both of these courses have the same outcome, but GEPs attract an NHS bursary in years 2,3 and 4 and allow you to start work as a doctor a year earlier. For a traditional five year course, graduates will not be able to get a student loan to cover course fees and so will need to find £3000 each year from 1-4, and then an NHS bursary in year 5.

Either way, a massive amount of debt seems to be the only way of getting through medical school as an oldie!

Fluid Balance charts

Back to my dad.

His swallow has been assessed (After ten days in hospital, where he had been drinking normal fluids) and they have decided that he should drink "thickened fluids" as he does not have a cough reflex. This means that if fluid starts going down "The wrong way" i.e. into the trachea, he will not cough and so he could aspirate (The fluid go into the lungs, with chance of causing pneumonia) :

"The cough reflex is a protective physiological mechanism that defends against aspiration of harmful substances into the respiratory tree." The stroke association

On hearing this, I gave him a drink of tea, with a teaspoon of "Thick and easy" in it and he looked at me as if another head had sprouted out of my neck. Thickened fluids are pretty grim things. They are so grim that he has stopped drinking them and so the nurses have had to get a venflon re-sited and put him on IV fluids. When a patient is on these, they need to have a fluid balance chart to record what is being put in and what is coming out. If nursing care is at a good standard and the charts are filled in correctly, they are a great help.

The problem is that the charts are not being filled in. For the past four nights, my mother and I have given him drinks and filled the charts in accordingly. My mother (Ex nurse of 27 years) and myself are the only ones filling them in. The nurses are not recording things going in or things coming out.

This is so hard to deal with: My father is likely to be on this ward for a long time and antagonising the ward staff is not a good way to go, but filling in fluid balance charts is just such a basic, basic task of nursing care. As they are empty of information, it is assumed that he is not drinking. My mother and I know that he is drinking, but as long as the charts are empty, he will remain on IV fluids.