Yucef’s Year 5 Advice

Salaam everyone,

Congratulations on finishing your BScs and making it to 5^th year, hope you all had a restful summer!

This is mainly a short(ish) resources blog (mainly for writtens) as I’m sure other people will send good advice emails and I don’t want to overload you with similar things. All I will say is:

1. PLEASE PACE YOURSELF – working now in August wont make any difference by the time it is 11 months later at the end of the year
2. Expect many wave peaks and troughs of your motivation/stress – please speak to friends and reach out to us final years if you ever need ANYTHING, we know exactly how you feel
3. DO NOT touch path now, it’s way too early to even acknowledge it exists, just focus for now in getting back into the swing of firms, learning how to do histories again, and understanding the teams/groups involved in looking after your patients
4. Honestly enjoy it, 5^th year can be very gruelling, and you will definitely have moments where you feel rubbish, but I can say that the medicine you learn is very very interesting and you pick up so much just from being back in that clinical environment again. Learning about paeds, o+g and psych is actual very cool
5. For anyone who has Northwick park or CX A+E, most useful placement I’ve done but….. rip

I’ve complied all the main resources into one main drive, so you don’t have to keep switching between different places to get everything you need. iA it will be useful you all. (if I come across any additional resources, Ill add them in due course iA). I also know some people would like a checklist of specialties conditions that they can work through as it was useful in 3^rd year. I unfortunately haven’t come across a good excel sheet  (theres one lined in the drive) but I personally found that the content pages of the MedEd Specialties Management Guide (also in the drive) is pretty good for keeping as a list.

Year 5 Resources Drive – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1J2rkQBBNenSgNgfUwkGK8dKm153z2H0_?usp=sharing

In terms of what resources I personally found useful (everyone is different):             

              These are some of the things I used to help make my anki flashcards for specialties and path, for those who don’t use anki, they could still be useful as a source of ‘notes’ to aid you when you cover conditions.

Specialties:

• PASSMED (very useful to familiarise yourself with conditions and whole new systems) and any other q banks you wanna use
• MedEd Specialties Management guide – quite succinct for all your conditions
• NICE CKS guidelines/RCOG/ICD-11/DSMV guidelines – don’t overload yourself with these as it can get confusing, but I used as a reference if unsure/double check things
• I personally didn’t use textbooks that much but things like Lissauers for Paeds and Crash Course Psych I knew people found useful
• Firms!!!

Pathology

• Rukh’s path notes – each topic is literally condensed into a few lines so is really good for cramming and keeping things simple
• Path guide – standard
• Nid’s notes – a bit more detailed but very well put together and really helped with understanding because I found the actual lectures terrible
• Past papers – definitely do as there a good number of repeats

Feel free to drop me a message/email if you have any questions or need any help

Yucef