18 May 2022
Placements as a first-year medical student
When I was choosing which university I would apply to, I remember reading that Anglia Ruskin medical students can expect to start placement in their first year… Read more…
Alex Grant
Faculty: Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care
Course:
BSc (Hons) Paramedic Science
Category: Allied and public health
29 November 2016
The second week of placement has seen me and my crew recover from night shifts and move into three 12-hour day shifts. Adjusting your sleeping pattern between days and nights can be a struggle at times and it’s certainly a skill that takes time to master.
Our three-day working weekend gave us a semi-dramatic end on Sunday with four blue calls placed in the shift, which kept us on our toes! Our first job of the shift was to a middle-aged gentleman that a doctor requested LAS (London Ambulance Service) to transport to hospital after an over-the-phone assessment. We arrived five hours after the call had been placed, due to the sheer volume of ‘life-threatening’ calls made throughout the night before. We attended the call and walked through the door to find the patient looking very flushed on the bed. After taking a radial pulse and feeling how ‘hot-to-touch’ he was, I could already predict how critically ill this person was. He was extremely pyrexic at 40.6 degrees, tachypnoeic at 42 breaths per minute, tachycardia of 116 beats per minute and had a SpO2 of 92% on air. This patient was presenting with severe sepsis and we blued him in the to nearest hospital.Disclaimer
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