Getting involved in research for the first time: reflecting on my student choice project in academic primary care

Alejandra Bonwick

 

 

by Alejandra Bonwick, Second Year Undergraduate Medical Student, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol

“If you devote yourself to being the best practitioner you can be, you will improve the lives of thousands of patients in your working lifetime.

If you teach students and young doctors, you will help to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients.

If, through research, you change the way we all practise, you will help to improve the lives of millions.”

Paul Freeling

High quality research is a cornerstone of our healthcare system: it ensures that evidence-based medicine underpins patient care. We are surrounded by it from the moment we start medical school, yet academic general practice is often more invisible than research in secondary care. Academic GPs are scattered across the country in smaller practices, rather than being concentrated in the hospitals where we spend the majority of placement … Read more

‘Our First Year Heard’ – curating the experiences of first-year medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic

 

 

By Louis Davenport, Medical Student, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol

My name is Louis Davenport, and I am a second-year medical student at the University of Bristol. I am the organiser of ‘Our First Year Heard’, a student art collection showcasing the effects of COVID-19 on first-year medical students.

The seed of the idea came from an extremely intense, one might say uncomfortable, experience that I had in the dissection room in my first year at medical school. While I am not particularly artistic myself, I made use of poetry to help process the experience and wrote several drafts of what would become What’s in front of you. From there I thought, why not collect the experiences of first-year medical students who might similarly wish to share them with other medical students and the wider public? Capturing the unique experiences of people who … Read more