Rotations and ABG

I'm nearing the end of my second term. Next week will be my last week in General Medicine. If you are wondering how the term works in Clinical Years of Medicine, it's totally different from the rest of undergrad programme where the year is devided into 2 semesters and you have inter-semester break in Winter.

With Medicine, on 4th Year, the year is devided into 5 major terms (well, for UWA anyway). The first term has is 4 weeks. It's the Intro Term (or what we called Core Clinical Methods). I was in Freo Hospital in this term. We had one week Nursing Attachment, learned to take blood etc., practice history taking and doing examination. No objectives, no assessment in this term. Like the name suggested, it's an intro on clerkship rotation that we will have in hosp. I had the chance to watch Endoscopy a few times with this. Oh, this term will no longer be there starting next year.

2nd till 5th term last for 8 weeks each. Here on, we start on Clerkship Rotation, where students are attached with a team in a hospital, and they'll learn all relavent and practical stuff depending on their rotation. With Rotation, what I mean is the different field. In 4th Year, we have General Medicine, Psychiatry, Surgery and Specialties (which is devided into Infectious Diseases, Ophthalmology and Geriatric). Oh, we do have regular lectures too. Our lectures are usually on Thursday afternoon.
And yes, PBL (Problem Based Learning) is still on. But don't fret, PBLs are more relevant starting this year seing on how we are now in Clinical Years, hence the approach is a little bit different, but more relevant and insteresting.

At the moment, I'm in the 7th Week of 2nd term. My Gen. Med. rotation in Royal Perth Hosp. is almost finished and I'll head to Charlie Gairdner Hosp. for Psych in 3rd term. After 3rd term, we have a one week vacation (more like a short break) and then the start of 4th term.

So you see, we do not have Easter Break, we do not have 3 weeks Winter break and we do not have end of semester exam. What we have is End of Year examination and that one week break in June.
Oh, and sometimes we do enjoy free hot chocolate or coffee for staff (or free flu vaccine shot last month) at times- only for those in RPH though...
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I did my first ABG yesterday, courtesy of my new Resident and the willing patients. ABG stands for Arterial Blood Gas. Hence as you can see, instead of taking blood from the vein, like they usually do for blood test (in which another skill that I love doing), this is the blood taken from the artery. Usual site is from your radial artery- at your wrist.

I'm with the Respiratory Team, so we do quite a bit of arterial blood gas with most of our patients (literally I think all). With ABG, we usually check for the blood pH, partial pressure of oxygen (pO2) and partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2).
As you can guess, Respiratory deals a lot with lungs and its function, so we wanna see what's the level of oxygen and CO2 of a patient: what type of respiratory failure do they have, do they need extra oxygen, do we put them on ventilator, is the CO2 level too high etc.
Of course, you also get other info like potassium and sodium level... from there, you can deduce the acid-base balance in one's body <- take note of this you 2nd years!

And I don't know why I am explaining all this in this entry...
If you are that interested, I may make this weblog a partial med-log; in case I inspire you on med, or my explanation helps you to understand med more