Session 4

Pre-reading

Professionalism Concerns – Case Studies 

Student 1  

You are a fourth year student and are the first in your family to attend University. You lived in halls in first year but due to financial pressures moved back home last year. You also took a job in a restaurant on Saturday nights to make some extra money and recently have been working Thursday and Friday nights too.  Last year your mother became unwell with severe depression. You have four younger siblings aged between 7 and 16, you are the eldest. Your dad is often abroad with work for long stretches.  

You were late this morning to the lecture because your mum was still asleep and your younger siblings needed help getting to school. This has been happening a few times recently and your GP tutor recently asked if you needed an alarm clock, in front of your peers.  

You feel very behind in your studying (you didn’t even know what today’s session was on), but don’t want anyone else to know and think you do a pretty good job of looking like you’re doing fine. You did really well in your A-Levels and in the first two years of medical school, as you found studying in the library in the evenings really helpful. Since you moved back home and started going on placement last year, you find you have less time to go to the library and there’s no space to study at home. You’d like to cut down on paid work but you use this money to pay for your travel to placement, phone bill and food.  

You have a few friends on the course who know home life is stressful but they don’t know the details, you don’t socialise with them much anymore because you’re always too busy and in any free time you feel you should be studying. You meet your Academic Advisor every term but it’s always a quick meeting and you can’t remember their name. You don’t think there are any student support services available for you, as they’re mostly just for students with ADHD or who have failed.  

Student 2 

You are a fourth year student and are living in a shared flat with 4 close friends. You went out last night for a friend’s birthday and didn’t get in until 3am – hence stopping to pick up coffee on your way. You weren’t going to attend this lecture, especially as your older brother is an ENT Trainee doctor and sent you some links of good websites where you can learn ENT. You came because you heard attendance might be monitored and are a bit annoyed that in fact it’s not.  

Your WhatsApp is going crazy with a group chat of the people that you were out with last night. Two of them are meant to be in this lecture too and are making fun of you for attending. In between this, you’re googling and using AI to check some of the things that are being discussed in the session – you’re not sure that a GP is qualified to teach you ENT and want to double check the information you’ve been given. You tend to find using GeekyMedics, YouTube and online question banks the best way to study. It’s worked well for you so far and your marks are good.  

By the time it comes to roleplays, you’re pretty bored and think you’ll have a bit of fun. You know this tutor group don’t generally contribute well to roleplays so you think you’ll have to carry it. You think the roleplay is a bit pointless to be honest because the website your brother sent you has really good videos of how to do ENT examination and you’ve done an online quiz on different tympanic membrane appearances whilst the tutor was going through their slides.  

Student 3 

You are a 4th year medical student and have attended today’s session as ENT is one of your interests and you think you may want to pursue it as a specialty. You commute in from Colchester where you live with your partner and are fairly selective about which sessions you go to as you want to use your time most effectively, and travel is expensive. You often worry you may be picking the wrong sessions to attend and thus wasting your time. You were relieved to see the name of the lecture theatre on your timetable as you prefer to learn in a lecture-based format. Since having problems in first and second year with failing some assessments, you have developed a system of careful note keeping during lectures and add it to a digital archive you have created on your tablet. You cross reference this with online resources, diagrams etc you find as you go to make a sort of interactive textbook which you’ll use later to revise from. You’re worried that if you don’t keep up with this system, your academic performance may slip back to how it was in the early years of the course.  

You find your tutor group difficult to get along with, although they all seem to get on quite well with each other. A few of them in particular can be loud or disruptive and are often whispering and laughing which makes you feel self-conscious and apart. You also find role plays really challenging, you don’t understand why the medical school is so fixated on using them, as you feel your time would be better spent getting information from the tutor and assimilating it into your notes. You’re often unclear what’s expected of you in a roleplay, and find it hard to listen to feedback about how you’ve done from your peers and tutors as it seems pretty irrelevant. When the tutor switches to mentis you find it overwhelming to scan QR codes, change device etc and so have decided to ignore them.