Ward Wednesdays

Bear with me, I know my daily alliteration is super cheesy, but I am sort of feeling it. Haha...

From the title, it's clear I spent the entire day on the ward. For those of you following my posts religiously, you would have noticed that I have only casually mentioned that I was on the ward, here and there. Till now, the majority of my days had been spent either at an outpatient clinic or attending some kind of teaching, but today was different. There were no scheduled teachings, and I had already booked the maximum amount of outpatient clinics for the week on other days so the ward it was. 

When I arrived at Acute Brain Injury Unit (ABIU)/Rehab ward, there was a new Specialist Registrar (SpR). An SpR is a doctor receiving advanced specialist training in their chosen field of medicine. After several years in this position, SpRs become Consultants. The new SpR will be on the ward for 6 months and today was her first day so after introducing myself my doctor began updating her and the Consultant on each of the patients on the ward.

After this, I participated in one of those online multidisciplinary team meetings. We met virtually with the team from another hospital, who wanted to provide an update on one of their referring patients, which we had discussed last week. The call was really positive. The team reported that in the last week the patient has made great strides of improvement in physical therapy, speech therapy, and performing tasks. Ultimately, it was decided to remove the patient from our waiting list because by the time they got to the top of it they would have improved too much to need the services of our facility. Everyone was happy with this decision and the call ended.

Back to the doctor's office, we went. I looked through the list of patients with my doctor and he assigned me the task of performing a peripheral nerve examination on a patient. I grabbed my notepad and headed to the ward. When I reached the patient's room, they were not there. I took a look around and found them in the day room enjoying the company of some other patients.

In the ABIU/Rehab ward, a patient's daily schedule can include specialist appointments out of the ward, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychotherapy, speech/language therapy, imaging, meals, and leisure time. At the Neurorehab unit, sometimes it is hard to locate the patients when you want to examine them. This was the case for me, the patient the doctor asked me to examine was having tea when I went to examine her. The hospital recommends that we allow patients to have their meals and enjoy their free time without interruption. There is even a sign on the ward reminding us of this and it says, "patients are happier when..."

I left the patient and decided to try again after lunch.

While it was amazing to hear about the recovery of a patient post-stroke, the highlight of my day would have to be that the new Specialist Registrar is from St. Lucia. Now, there are two Caribbean people on the ward, her and me! I am looking forward to getting to know her and talking to her more about her path to working in the UK as she also did not study here. In a few months, I will be making the same transition and I am sure there is some advice she could give me into this process.