Personal experience, books required, hospital selection, advise, anything else you think may be helpful for people going on to third year

By: Wong Ling Ling

From my personal experience, I would say that the transition to 3rd year was quite a huge one, simply because we move from a more passive learning environment (lectures and tutorials where the information is just ‘spoon fed’ to you) to a proactive learning environment, where you often have to depend on yourself and your group mates to arrange for tutorials, practice OSCE and go for things like ward rounds. It suddenly feels like there are so many things to learn and everyone around you seems to know way more than you do. Take one step at a time and tackle those things that are most important 1st, ie. PBLs, CBLs, pathology cases as well as learning your clinical skills (from the good ol’ Talley) before trying to read beyond the scope.

Hospital selection

There is a range of hospitals you can choose from for 3rd year. I personally went to the Alfred Hospital so I would definitely have a bias towards that hospital. Lol! But it really depends on the kind of learning you want. The major difference I have noticed when talking to my friends at other sites was that places like Alfred and Boxhill tend to have more didactic teaching and timetable planned out for you properly. It is also these big hospitals where all the action takes place with patients coming in with interesting and sometimes rare disease (bearing in mind that we need to learn how to see the common before the uncommon). It is important to note though that if you go to the Alfred, you will have one rotation (5 weeks) at Sandringham hospital and if you go to Boxhill hospital, you will be rotated to Maroondah for one whole semester.

However, places like MMC and Dandenong pretty much left you to do a lot on your own. So if you are the very independent sort of person, these places might be good for you as you are free to do whatever you want and learn at your own time and space. You will also definitely get more opportunities such as helping to clerk patients and fill in discharge summaries at these sites.

It is important to note though that choosing a site near the place you live is important as you will be going to this place for the whole year and will not want to spend half the time traveling. It would be good if you can get people to carpool (if you don’t have a car).

Books

The main bulk of the work in 3rd year is very much based on each disease process so the really essential books will be (I try not to recommend tonnes of books because most of us will not end up using quite a number of books and they will just be sitting crisp and new on our shelf):

• For the PBLs/CBLs:
  • Kumar and clark

  • Davidson’s
  • Harrisons
• For Pathology:
  • Underwood

  • Robbins (mama size is more than enough)
• For clinical skills:
  • Talley, Talley, Talley
• To bring on the wards (to read whilst waiting around):
  • Oxford handbook of clinical medicine

To sum that up, my general advice would be that you would have to start 3rd year with an open mind, be prepared to make new friends because you might not always be lucky enough to be posted to the same site as your friends, to learn and take in as much as you can and it would certainly be very rewarding!