The general medical take involves clerking in Accident and Emergency.

Turn up to A&E on time and find the medical registar or consultant on call. Introduce yourself to them.

Patients present to one of multiple areas in ED (Resus, A,B,C). They can also go to Paeds ED or minors but you don't see these.

The trackboard (on epic) shows a sortable list of patients, with buttons that let you filter by each specialty.

The ones that need to be seen are listed as “medicine” or “ED/MED” (though ED see these too). Patients that are listed under “medicine” are ones that are triaged as having a medical problem or one that is likely to require admission under the general medical team.

There is a checklist of things that has to be done for each patient (stuck up in multiple places in ED). This includes, reconciling and prescribing their meds, doing their VTE assessment and adding them to morning report (an epic list). Patients that are not added to medical morning report can well be missed the next day.

In order to add a patient to morning report: 1) Click on 'Tx Team' button at the top of the page 2) 'Add me' to put on the board that you are seeing them 3) Under 'treatment team', type in 350 which is the code for morning report. 4) Click accept. Do this for every patient you see! If they end up being sent home, they will automatically be removed from morning report.

Take a full history and clerking, come up with a basic management plan, and then make sure your patient is senior reviewed. Only doctors who are post-PACES can senior review.

This is a great set of shifts - can be very busy, but often an excellent opportunity to learn some general medicine, make your own diagnoses, and get some of your eportfolio signed off.