Friday Headlines
the weekly newsletter from EHS
Introduction to medicine for future medics
25 May 2018
Tom and the Medical Mavericks team led a thoroughly exciting Year 6 workshop where our girls used real medical equipment to run a variety of diagnostic tests on real patients - themselves!
Everyone had the opportunity to practise intubating Eddy the prosthetic head, drawing blood using a real syringe from Andy the arm, having a photograph of their retina taken using the eye (i)-phone and measuring their peak flow. New equipment this year included an infra-red vein scanner, which enabled us to easily find blood vessels under the skin and a pulse doppler, which allowed us to 'listen' to our pulse and find out how elastic our blood vessels are.
Some of our girls turned into mini-medics for the day and set themselves up to take ECGs for their peers whilst others mastered the art of finding growth plates in a patient's wrist. Thankfully, our findings show that all Year 6 patients will continue to grow in the foreseeable future!
Everyone had the opportunity to try on 'pathology goggles' which allowed the girls to experience different eye diseases and ailments. A new pair of goggles attempted to reconstruct the effect of brain damage on a person's sight and it was interesting to physically experience how the optic nerve messages go to different parts of the brain. The favourite to try on was the double vision glasses which can be equated to the effect of 10 pints of beer on a person's eyesight.
The next step is to look through our results and discuss the medical equipment in more depth. We will also find out a little more about all the different routes a person can take to gain a successful career in Healthcare.
The session was a great opportunity to understand more about all the jobs in the NHS, from medical engineers to doctors to cardiac scientists (and all those in between!). It's
safe to say our girls thoroughly enjoyed their workshop and many left with a keen interest in pursuing a career in medicine in the future.
Medical Mavericks
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