My medical journey ‘officially’ began in 2010, in a small tutorial room at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, learning about the intricacies of the formation of action potentials in squid axons. Now, 14 years on, I’m in my final year of GP training just a short distance away on the Reading and Newbury training scheme. I’ve taken what I describe as a slightly ‘wiggly, windy’ path to where I am now, and this article will share this journey with reflections and learnings along the way.

Early Years and Medical School

Medical school seems like a distant memory now, but I spent an amazing, yet challenging 6 years studying pre-clinical and then clinical medicine at Oxford. I gained varied experience across local hospital and GP placements as well as abroad doing paediatrics in South Africa and medical elective in Fiji and Australia. I don’t think any amount of studying can ever truly prepare you for doing the job, but I feel the hard work I put in during these years have stood me in good stead for my onward career.

Foundation Training and Career Path Exploration

After medical school, I was an Academic Foundation trainee at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital for F1 and F2, which included a 4-month academic post in Medical Education. Like all new F1s, it was a steep learning curve and with my first job being Renal Medicine, I really did have a baptism with fire. This was very challenging initially – I spent lots of the early days on the ward at cannulas and spending an age looking up dialysis doses of medicines in the BNF, however this gave me a great foundation in managing medical complexity – skills which I still call upon now (and made requests for cannulas on night shifts a much less daunting principle!)

Though F1 and F2 are busy years of navigating shift work, regularly rotating between departments and having to learn quickly on the job, some of my most rewarding experiences came from the ‘extra’ bits I did alongside the day-to-day job. A particularly notable example was a project which I was encouraged to join by my Registrar in geriatrics at the time, to improve the response to examining, investigating, and treating patients after an inpatient fall. This involved learning new skills in audit, process mapping, data analysis and presentation of data and eventually led to a multi-site improvement programme which produced statistically and clinically significant improvements in the management of patients post fall, and led to us presenting this work nationally, internationally and eventually in peer reviewed journal articles. Yes, this was a lot of work but it showed me the power of taking opportunities that aligned with my interests. It also taught me what a good quality improvement project really looked like and again – these remain skills I still use today, and the lessons learnt and achievements from this project have no doubt helped me into some of the roles later in my medical journey.

Following Foundation training, I moved to University College Hospital London to start Core Medical Training (CMT) – at this point, inspired by one of my old lecturers, thinking I wanted to be a Haematologist. My first 6 months of CMT was spent as a Haematology trainee – a busy, challenging and intellectually stimulating job where I learnt so much – both from colleagues (particularly the Haem nurses) and the patients, and made some lifelong friends. However, I also reached the uncomfortable conclusion that I didn’t think this was the career path I wanted. This was a difficult time for me – having thought for years that my mind was made up about what I wanted to do. I decided to continue with Core Medical Training regardless, hoping that another specialty would pique my interest – sitting all my exams along the way, with Pastest by my side through MRCP Part 1 and 2! Whilst there were other jobs I loved – be it the fast paced, multidisciplinary nature of Stroke Medicine, or the huge variability of Acute Medicine, or the complex and holistic work in Care of the Elderly, I finished CMT feeling a bit at a loss about what I wanted to do.

Year Off and Medical Leadership

So, I followed in the footsteps of many other trainees and decided to take a year off the training ‘hamster wheel’ to learn some new skills and re-evaluate. I was lucky enough to get a place on the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management (FMLM) National Medical Director’s Leadership scheme, and spent a year in Medical Leadership – where my role focused on using National Clinical Audit data to drive Quality Improvement at a local and national level. This role could not have been further from the clinical work I’d been doing up to this stage – in part because it was the COVID pandemic so I spent the entire year working remotely. I could write an article in itself about the learning from my time out of training, but there are a few key things that have stuck with me. Firstly, I met so many healthcare professionals who had built themselves careers with variety and which matched their interest – in particular I met a number of inspiring GPs who opened my eyes to the flexibility that this job really affords. It encouraged me to explore and follow my own interests and I worked with a career coach through this time which helped me articulate these interests in a way I’d previously not managed. Secondly, though I really enjoyed aspects of the work, it cemented in my mind that I wanted to continue to work clinically, albeit as part of a portfolio career in the future – I missed seeing patients much more than perhaps I had imagined I would. Finally, as cliched as it sounds, it was the ‘soft’ skills I picked up in this year which I think have helped me, and will continue to help my medical career – be that time management, networking skills and skills in working as both a leader and follower in a team.

Teaching Fellowship at Imperial College London

At this point, despite my career coaching revelations and rejuvenated enthusiasm for clinical medicine, I still wasn’t sure exactly where I wanted my medical journey to go next. This is where serendipity steps in – something that I think plays a part in almost every career journey I’ve heard of. I was sharing my newly articulated interest in preventative medicine with a colleague, who shared a job they thought I might want to interview for – as a teaching fellow at Imperial College London on their Lifestyle Medicine and Prevention (LMAP) module. Typically, the closing date for applications was the following day, so cue a late-night update of my CV and job application. I was fortunate enough to get this job, which quite simply was one of the most incredible years of my career. Again, this was another steep learning curve and a busy year of creating educational content, producing videos, writing and marking exams, re-learning statistics so I could teach this to medical students and mentoring a small group of students. I’d never have got this job without the experiences and taking the opportunities that came before, and this job has also heavily influenced my own practice and onward medical journey. Getting this job was a real lesson in the power of articulating and following your interests – teaching students about a topic I was passionate about and interested in didn’t feel like work most of the time. Again, I also learnt huge amounts from the people I worked with – from my manager to the students, and made some amazing friends along the way (you can start to see some recurrent themes emerging on this journey!)

Embracing General Practice

The next step on this wiggly windy road was to get back into training – and in August 2022 I stepped back onto the training pathway as a GP trainee – going full circle and working as an Obs and Gynae trainee in the department that I was born. By this point I felt fully comfortable in the decision I’d made to start GP training. Though lots of my peers who had gone straight into GP training were qualifying as GPs just as I was starting, I’ve never once regretted taking the extra time to get to GP training – all that experience I think has made me a better GP and opened my eyes to opportunities I would not have known were there.

Reflections and Looking Ahead

So – after 6 years at medical school, 9 different hospital jobs across 2 cities, 3 GP placements, endless undergraduate and 6 postgraduate exams (and almost as many Pastest subscriptions!) – Yes, it’s a difficult job, and there have been plenty of difficult moments along the journey, but I can wholeheartedly say that there is no other job I’d rather be doing. I don’t regret any part of the ‘wiggly, windy’ route I’ve taken and though I might not remember much about squid axon action potentials, the learning from everything that’s happened on the journey before makes me the doctor I am today and I look forward to seeing where this journey takes me next.