Today was the first proper day of lectures for my intercalated BSc. For those who don’t know, this is basically an extra year at university, taken between my third and fourth years at medical school. The first half is a taught course, the second a research project resulting in a thesis. It means I spend 6 years at university, instead of the usual 5, but it means I graduate twice and get to put “BSc (Hons)” at the end of my name!
There are two main reasons for doing it. 1) It looks good on the old CV, and 2) it means I get to put off moving into the real world for another year. Sure it’s another year without a salary, but what the hell? I’m not going to graduate with any debt, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of my classmates.
So, first impressions?
Well, to sum up, I already have a 2000 word assignment to do and I’ve not even had 5 hours worth of teaching time yet! The timetable itself is busier than expected, but so far the content has been reasonable.
I couldn’t stop smiling during the first lecture this morning. To be back in a classroom – learning – I just love it. Three months is too long to be away, I was getting very bored with the holidays. Of course, it’s been longer than that since I had any teaching that’s been worth writing home about. I now know what the older students meant when they said we’d be relying on the textbooks a lot in fourth year. The tutorials in the one 5 week block that I had before the summer ranged from the inspired to the dire.
To return to today; we got our first taste of health economics in ‘Economic Evaluation 1′. It was mostly being introduced to new terms and concepts, the like of which have never even been hinted at in medicine so far. Things like allocative and technical efficiency; outcome cost. I think next time we’re looking at Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), something that has often come up in NICE guidance.
We also got our first epidemiology lecture, looking at case control studies. Although a lot of it was revision, it was nice to have it all synthesised into one coherent chunk of information. The whole way through, I kept thinking back to Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, and the fact that everyone in the room should read it. Although we should be analysing data at a more complex level than that in Bad Science, it explains the basic concepts so well that I’m going to read it again; just for kicks.
So apart from that 2000 word essay, which by the way requires me to describe the steps I would undertake if I was going to perform an economic evaluation of a new drug for the NHS, I had a cracking first day.
