September in Aberystwyth

Hello, my name is Sue Fish and I’m the Senior Clinical Lecturer for the CARER Programme based in Aberystwyth. I’m also a GP in Borth Surgery 9 miles north of Aberystwyth and I have one of the 7 CARER students, Abishek based with me. I grew up in Cardiff and trained in London but love living and working as a GP in Mid Wales and so I’m really happy that Cardiff Medical School has started the CARER Programme so that Medical Students can experience the fantastic learning opportunities that General Practice in more rural areas of Wales can offer.

I can’t believe that the first 4 weeks of the placement have already gone. It’s been busy, the students have had to settle in to their new accommodation, get to know their GP Tutors and the wider primary care teams, find their way around Aberystwyth and the University and been introduced to the consultants at Bronglais Hospital.

We have access to excellent teaching facilities in Aberystwyth University where the students and I meet for teaching every Thursday and Friday after spending the first half of their week with their GP practices. The teaching is a mix of viewing panopto recorded lectures, tutorials delivered by tutors from Cardiff in person and using blackboard collaborate and tutorials delivered by myself and other locally based clinicians.

All of my colleagues have been extremely pleased to welcome the students to their surgeries and have found lots of different opportunities for teaching. The patients aren’t used to seeing medical students and so they are also very happy to discuss their conditions and really value the opportunity to contribute to training the next generation of doctors. There are a mix of GP practices, some based in Aberystwyth, some more rural, some larger and some smaller and three of them are attached to community hospitals. So there is plenty of different learning experiences for everyone.

Aberystwyth University and Bronglais Hospital have already invited the students to lectures, this one was on diabetes and was well attended by academics, health care professionals and patients.

I’ll be coming to Cardiff on 19^th October with some of the students to talk about the first 6 weeks of the CARER Programme in Aberystwyth and you’ll hear about what else the students have been doing since they arrived directly from them, via this blog over the next few weeks.