RickInOz

But a long journey still ahead.

After much procrastinating and deliberation, the AMC have finally accepted that I may actually be who I say I am. But this isn’t enough for the South Australian Medical Board, so the next stage is undeway. I received my provisional AMC certificate before Christmas, but can’t get full registration until I prove that I am a junior doctor again.

That’s right, despite holding a post-graduate Australian fellowship qualification, I still have to go through 3 separate exams. It wouldn’t be too bad if these were similar to the tough exam I’ve recently been through, but instead they want to test me as if I’d just graduated.

So this is going to be a tough challenge. I essentially have to forget over 8 years of medical experience and initiative and reduce myself to the clumsy, naive standard of a final year medical student. This means asking lots of vague questions and being more interested in trivialities like the patient’s pets than what’s actually wrong with them. For some reason, medical students are taught to take a medical history in a manner that is utterly impractical for everyday practice. It doesn’t take long before junior doctors learn the real way to interview patients that gets the maximum amount of relevant information in the shortest possible time.

But I’ll have to play by the board’s rules and remember to ask irrelevant questions like “How old is your wife/husband/spouse/cat/antique plate collection?”, rather than “Why did you come to hospital today?”. Hopefully I’ll get through this test, but I’m not holding my breath. One of my colleagues who’s going through a similar ordeal, and is a better physician than me, failed his for failing to ask the name of the patient’s children and when she’d last had a smear.

The first of the exams is next week. I’ll keep you posted on what trivial technicalities they pick me up on.