MB21 Year 2 Student Choice Placements

2018/2019

Information and Guidance for Supervisors offering clinical and/or academic placements in Primary Care


What are Year 2 student choice placements?

Student choice placements are opportunities for students to:

  • Increase confidence in their own skills and abilities
  • Present their work
  • Consider career path / learn more about a speciality
  • Have more control of their own learning and self-directed study
  • Study, in depth, topics outside the ‘core’ curriculum

At the start of Year 2, MBChB students will undertake a 3-week Student Choice placement and a 3-week period of clinical orientation (known as an Effective Consulting Clerkship (ECC)). The year will be split in two with half the students starting with ECC, and half starting with their student choice placement.

Block A / Block B
½ the year group / Effective consulting clerkship / Student Choice Placement
½ the year group / Student Choice Placement / Effective consulting clerkship

When are the student choice Placements?

Block A : Tuesday 18th September 2018 – Friday 5th October 2018 (excluding Friday 28th September)

Block B : Tuesday 9th October 2018 – Thursday 25th October 2018

What are the other Key Dates I need to know about?

Deadline for placement proposals to be submitted to primary care team / 21 August 2017
Deadline for primary care team to submit proposals to central team / 31 August 2017
Notification of approval of placement proposals / 30th September 2017
Please note, this approval does not guarantee take-up of a placement proposal by students
Release of placement list to students / Easter 2018
Deadline for students to select placements / TBA
Assessment of written reports (Block A) / 8 Oct – 22 Oct 2018
Assessment of written reports (Block B) / 29 Oct – 12 Nov 2018
Year 2 Student Choice Placement Poster Day / Week of 14 Jan 2019

Who can offer a placement?

Anyone within the university, clinical academies, virtual academies (which includes primary care), local community and third sector settings.

In practice this means any General Practitioner (partner, salaried, locum, GPwSIetc) can be a supervisor, as can any of your colleagues who might be interested (health visitors, pharmacists, nurses, paramedics, practice manager, third sector colleagues etc). Any research staff members within the Centre for Academic Primary Care can be a supervisor (please note, you do NOT have to be a clinician to offer a placement).

You should ideally be able to offer the same placement opportunity to a given number of students during both Block A and Block B (i.e run the same/similar placement twice, but for different groups in each of the two blocks).

Please remember, not all placements will be chosen by students. The placement is only confirmed when the student/supervisor agreement is signed.

What kind of placements can be offered?

Year 2 Student Choice placements should be clinically relevant, and deliver transferable skills (eg teaching, research, management, leadership, self-directed learning skills). All placements should include the following:

  1. A practical component – this could be ‘experiential learning’ in a clinical, simulated, academic or third sector setting
  1. An academic component – such as researching or reviewing relevant literature

Within this students’ can undertake audit, service evaluation, development of educational material for students, patients or the public, or could consider aspects of medical ethics/policy/law, or medical humanities. This is not meant to be an exhaustive or restrictive list, so please do chat to us about any ideas you have.

Please see examples of new placement ideas (Appendix 1), and also examples of year 2, 3 and 4 Student selected components (SSCs) currently offered by Primary Care (Appendix 2) which might give you some ideas.

How much should students be doing during their 3-week block?

Activities during the placement can cover any time during the normal teaching day (9am-6pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and 9am-1pm on Wednesday). Out of hours/weekend activities can be organised but these need to be clearly stated on the proposal form. The total student time spent on the placement should not exceed 35 hours per week.

What are the funding arrangements to support a Year 2 Student Choice placement?

Audit, service improvement, literature review, educational resource development etc with some time spent in GP, will be paid at the standard rate to GP practices of £430.96 per student.

For other Student Choice Projects please enquire for more details. Please note, full budgets for these proposals need to be submitted with placement proposal details, but we are happy to chat through the process with you at any point.

Placements within the Centre for Academic Primary Care do not attract any additional payment for individual staff members but are a good opportunity to increase your teaching portfolio, and to get involved with teaching

What is the role of the placement supervisor? What will I have to do?

  • Complete placement proposal and risk assessment form (we can help support you in this if needed)
  • Have a phone conversation or email with any interested students to help them decide if they want to apply for your placement
  • Complete the student/supervisor agreement form once agreement has been made to go ahead (this is the point at which the student has agreed to take up your placement offer and the Choice Placement should go ahead)
  • Discuss the risk assessment with students as soon as (or before) they start the placement
  • Agree a work log with individual students to cover what day to day activities have been agreed during the placement
  • Undertake supervision of the students during the placement and discuss progress (or delegate this task appropriately)
  • Meet with individual students on or around the last day of the placement to give immediate verbal feedback on achievements during the placement period
  • Mark the placement reports (2000 words) using the online marking process during the allocated 2 week marking period (See dates above) [Supervisors will be asked to assess the report taking into account the student’s approach to the placement (including engagement and attendance), the outcomes of the placement and the students’ reflections on their experience, the overall presentation of the report]
  • You are invited to attend the poster presentation in January but this isn’t compulsory

How do I know at what level to ‘pitch’ my placement / what will students already know at this point if they’ve only done one year at medical school?

Prior learning in year 1 will include:

a)Biomedical and Human Science: 9 weeks foundations of medicine covering fundamental principles, 7 systems based two week cycles of case based learning focusing on health and well-being in the musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, urinary, nervous and endocrine systems.

b)Clinical Learning: students will have completed a Healthcare Assistantship (5 shifts over 3 weeks), BLS training and 7 days of Effective Consulting (EC, which covers clinical communication, clinical reasoning, and clinical skills). EC is delivered both on campus, and in primary and secondary care. Students will have spent 7-8 half days in primary care, and 3-4 half days in secondary care.

c)Generic skills: collaborative self-directed learning will be encouraged in year 1 through small group case based learning. Students will also have completed a Year 1 student choice project consisting of literature review in a topic selected from scientific, humanities and clinical aspects of their studies.

Why should I offer a Student Choice placement?

  • Student are engaged and interested
  • Exposure to primary care increases the chance of a student choosing GP as a career
  • Good for your appraisal / annual review
  • Relatively easy way to get involved in teaching
  • Students can do useful pieces of work for you
  • Teaching students is stimulating and interesting

I’ve offered Year 3 and 4 SSCs in the past, what’s happened to them?

For now, these will be continuing (so between Sep-Dec 2017 we will also be asking for SSC proposals for those students completing their year 3 or 4 SSC in July 2018). You can offer both year 3 / 4 SSCs and Year 2 Student Choice projects. They can be similar (although you will need to take into account the different levels of prior learning and clinical experience) or completely different! Or you may choose to offer a placement only for year 2, or only for year 3 or 4.

I’ve offered Year 2 ‘Group’ SSCs before, what’s happened to them?

These will run for the last time in 2017-18 and have already been allocated. However, many of these will make good Year 2 Student Choice Placements with some adjustments. Please do speak to us about how this might work, and we can help modify these superb placements for the new cohort of students.

I’ve never run any kind of SSC before. How much work is involved? What do I actually do?

There’s not a short answer to this as it honestly depends on the type of project / placement offered.

For taught courses, there will be more face to face interaction with students. For an audit or development of patient education resource in primary care, there could be somewhere between 6-12 hours work involved. We have given a worked example on the following page – but this is not prescriptive, just to give you an idea of what might be involved.

You are NOT expected to spend all day every day with your student for 3 weeks! In fact, this is positively discouraged. Students must spend no more than 35 hours per week on their Student Choice project and must have time for self-directed activities. See the next section on ‘what are students expecting from their choice placement for more information on this.

Please note this is just an example – there will be many, varied ways of running a project, and each will necessarily have different types and times of placement, contact, and time spend on activities.

Example timetable for a student in GP designing a patient resource eg leaflet, video, web page

Pre week 1 – GP and student 1 hr to discuss work log etc. Post week 3 – GP 2 hours marking.

Wk 1 / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Total time
AM / Intro day at university / Meet for intro – show around practice, log in etc.
GP 2 hrs / Student interviews patients in waiting room / Student sits in surgery to learn more about GP
GP 1 hr out of surgery for teaching / Student interviews patients in waiting room / GP 3 hours (4 hrs cumulative)
PM / Intro day at university / Self directed study / Self directed study / Self directed study
Wk 2 / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Total time
AM / Self directed study / Student sits in surgery to learn more about GP
GP 1 hr out of surgery for teaching / Self directed study / resource development / Self directed study / resource development / Student meet 2-3 expert patients / patients with condition or meet with PPG to show first draft of resource / GP 2 hours
(6 hours cumulative)
PM / Self directed study / Self directed study / resource development / Student sits in surgery to learn more about GP
GP 1 hr out of surgery for teaching / Self directed study
Wk 3 / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Total time
AM / Student meets with HCA, nurses, pharmacist reception staff and Practice manager to discuss resource / Student and GP meet for review of resource
GP 0.5 hour / Self directed study / resource development / report writing
Student hand in resource and placement report / Final session – verbal assessment feedback
GP 0.5 hour / Central University day / GP 2 hours
(8 hours cumulative)
PM / Self directed study / resource development / report writing / Self directed study / resource development / report writing / Student sits in surgery to learn more about GP
GP 1 hr out of surgery for teaching / Central University day

What are students expecting from their Student Choice placement?

Students are told that they should agree activities with their supervisor, and should develop a professional relationship with their supervisor. Above all we want them to enjoy these placements! Students are given the following as possible activities that can occur within their student choice weeks, and this might help you with some ideas for designing a placement.

  • Taking part in a clinical placement (specify what you are doing: theatre, clinics, ward work, GP surgery, third sector etc).
  • Gathering data and reviewing data (reviewing patient notes, lab results, databases etc).
  • Taking part in a taught module (what course: medical education, research methods, simulation etc). For example, in primary care, if neighbouring practices are also hosting students, you could run a joint tutorial one week
  • Creating resources (describe which ones: an educational video, patient leaflet etc).
  • Self-directed learning (say what you are doing: working in the library, writing up your project, at meetings, planning your project and organising your thoughts etc).
  • Other (there are a wide range of activities which underpin a successful placement experience. So long as they have been agreed with your supervisor they are legitimate and we encourage you to record them).

Want to be involved or have more questions

Please contact the Primary Care Teaching the Primary Care lead for Student Choice: for more information.

Any ideas will be considered, and we can help sculpt your idea into a fully formed Student Choice Project offer, so if you have something you’re interested in providing that doesn’t quite seem to fit here or you’re not sure how to make a project out of it, please do make contact to discuss it further.

What next?
If you know what project you want to offer, please complete the proposal proforma and risk assessment (which we will send separately) and email them both back to by August 21st at the latest.

Appendix 1

Some possible examples of Year 2 student choice placements:

Please note again that this is not an exhaustive list and you should feel free to offer other placements that fulfil the criteria above.

  1. Research methods / short courses: these could set students up for intercalated degrees
  2. Medical education: teaching skills / development of educational resources eg patient leaflets, videos, web-based resources)
  3. Medical politics: understanding our role in society and the economic and social context we work in
  4. Medical management: involves risk assessment, governance, accounting, HR management and health policy. Short placements with GP partners, practice managers, CCG level management etc
  5. Social (health) policy: this should map onto public health, national or international. The list is endless but could include poverty – food banks, deprivation / women’s health issues / child poverty / substance abuse / domestic violence / crime and health. This could include placements with individual GPs who have an interest, or could involve talking with GPs about the role of social prescribing, and the involvement in applying for benefits etc.
  6. Medical application of language: placements could involve working in primary care with GPs who speak other languages relevant to medical practice in a multicultural society, or creating videos of patient leaflets in the second language
  7. Sports medicine: linked to physiology and anatomy, could provide the basis for future intercalation
  8. Military medicine
  9. Medical ethics and Law
  10. Medical humanities
  11. International medicine / primary care in other countries (developed or developing)
  12. Controversies in medicine
  13. Medicine in Extreme environments
  14. Primary care in and of itself can be a placement – we know that 50% of students will choose to be GPs, and this gives students the opportunity to spend more time in primary care
  15. Placements with third sector organisations
  16. Placements with health visitors and other community health care teams

Appendix 2

Examples of Primary Care SSCs currently offered (across year 2, 3 and 4)

Complementary therapies
Creative arts
Mindfulness
Optimum health for later life
Religious belief and Medical Ethics
Sustainable healthcare
Poetry of medicine
SSCs in wider primary care context
Integrative Medicine: resilience building whole person care with a focus on cancer
Primary care in Special settings
-Prison GP
-One25 (street sex workers)
-Haven (asylum)
-Compass (homeless health)
Understanding primary care at the CCG level
SSC with the RCGP –shadowing the President of the RCGP
The bigger picture – global primary healthcare in 2016
Educational placement alongside children with learning difficulty
Facial difference and Identity – creative, clinical and academic perspectives
SSCs at the Centre for Academic primary care
Researching Urgent, Unscheduled and Emergency Care
DV and community pharmacy
Public health interventions in community pharmacy
Healthcare priority setting
How can we improve staff patient communication in advanced renal disease
End of life in care homes
Development and validation of the multimorbidity treatment burden questionnaire
Choices in cardiovascular consultations
Antimicrobial stewardships
E learning – consultation skills
E learning projects – primary care core problems
Audits in local GP practices –
Thromboembolic risk in AF patients
Antidepressants in women of child bearing age
Care of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar or psychosis
Consultation time
Pregnancy and diabetes
NOAC and kidney function
Psychosis health monitoring
Rhinosinusitis adherence to local guidelines
FGM
Suppporting the physical health of individuals requiring antipsychotics
Immunisation
Type 2 diabetes
Early cancer diagnosis
Patient doctor continuity and consultations
Management of DV in GP
Multiple open audit topics at various practices
Dementia
EOL care
Caring for doctors
CKD
Evaluating needs of patients with dementia
Prescription of buprenorphine patches in primary care
QI projects in local GP practices
EMIS QIP
Recall QIP
Patient education projects in local GP practices
Open choice
Culturally appropriate resource development
Literature review projects in local GP practices
Exercise on prescription
Extreme polypharmacy in the community setting