The O&G workshop

I went to an obstetrics and gynaecology conference last weekend. I meant to write about it sooner but it’s been a busy week!

The workshop was a one day event for students run by several O&G registrars from the local hospitals. I wasn’t sure how good or useful the conference was going to be, but it ended up being both! The registrars were obviously trying to sell O&G as a career, but not from some underlying agenda but purely because they genuinely really enjoy O&G and think that it’s a great specialty to be in. I found it a bit hard to believe that it’s as good as they say it is from other things that I’ve heard, but I do believe that compared to many other specialties it’s a good one to be in.

My main concerns about O&G were about the working hours and the range of work that you do. I think that I would enjoy the obstetrics side more than the gynae side (particularly gynaeoncology), but they were saying that the split is approx 70:30 obs:gynae and the majority of the more complex gynae things and gynaeoncology is generally done by specific gynae specialists in tertiary hospitals. I also learnt that you can be an O&G generalist doing a bit of everything in a DGH (with a better work life balance), or specialize in a specific area and work in a bigger tertiary type hospital (but with a worse work life balance!).

They gave an example of one of their consultants who works Mon, Thur and Fri daytimes and a Tuesday nighttime, and because out of hours work counts for more than normal working hours, doing these 4 shifts counts as the consultant working full time! One of the registrars there was working LTFT (less than full time), working 60% of full time (which equates to 3 days work a week and just over half of the on call time) which I think would be a good option if I end up having children, although it does increase the specialty training length.

I love medicine! There’s so much variety and choice. My problem with deciding what specialty I want to do, is that there’s so many amazing options, that choosing just one is going to be hard! I have thought about a career O&G previously, enough to choose it as the specialty to base my patient case studies on that we’re doing in uni at the moment, but after the workshop I’m seriously considering it.

At the conference we also did several different workshops, and modesty out of the window, I was awesome at laproscopy! My friend and I were the only pair to manage to get all of the pasta tubes onto the string J. Too bad I don’t have surgical aspirations! I also got a freebie tourniquet! I was under the impression that you had to use disposable tourniquets in hospital though, so I don’t know if I can actually use it, but I still enjoy having it.

I also went to one of my friend’s engagement party the other day and we were looking through a wedding magazine. It made me really want to get engaged now and have a big sparkly diamond on my finger too! In all seriousness though, I have heard that it’s beneficial to get married before the end of med school because otherwise you’ll end up having your non married name as your professionally registered name and only be able to use your married name personally as it’s hard to get your doctor name changed. I don’t know how true this is though.