St1: Working Week
You will be working pretty much as the rest of us as a GP but with loads of support around you – everyone is very friendly and feel free to ask questions before, during or after a consultation. There will be a named GP covering your surgeries but feel free to catch anyone – the duty doctor is often a good bet.
The working week is a mixture of surgeries (seeing patients), urgent appointments, covering duty – including home visits, tutorials, covering the hospital (rarer with the new setup), teaching at TCGP on day release and the odd OOH shift. You will also have a half day study leave per week. This can be taken as a full day every two weeks.
You will start with nice long 30 minute appointments but quickly you will find that this is actually too much time and quite quickly you will find 20 minutes is plenty – remember this time includes writing up the notes and “House keeping” – resetting for the next patient (look up consultation models). There will be plenty of catch up slots – gaps in the surgery to allow you to get back on track if things slip – which they often do…for all of us! Some patients need more time that other by the nature of their complaint – if you feel it needs more time then try and develop your own way of managing this – some know they have a catch up coming and use this – others might organise a follow up appointment to discuss things further or to thoroughly go through a second, third or fourth problem on the patient’s list!
Very simple presentations can be complicated in ST1 – treating acne for example would seem very simple and it is when you have treated it a few times but in ST1 you might not have! The same applies to many seemingly simple conditions – ask one of the GPs if you meet one of these sorts of things and the next time it will be a simple consultation! Although saying that these simple conditions can become more complicated as the patient will then say – “I’ve already tried all of those, what’s next…”
Looking ahead to the next week on EMIS is always useful to see what is scheduled in – if there are loads of empty appointments don’t worry they won’t stay that way!