Ryan

Where did you do your work experience?

Basildon

What did you do?

As I want to be a doctor in the future, I decided to try and get work experience in my local hospital. My experience was in the Day Surgery Unit at Basildon Hospital. It’s a large, busy, and very demanding unit with a variety of different staff.

For my first day I was placed in reception and it was quite interesting to see the medical records being sorted and the forms being processed for the surgery pre-assessments. Then the next day was my first day on a ward! I even got to wear a set of scrubs - cool or what?!

I was shown how to admit the patients. I collected their medical records and brought them to their allocated bed, and talked them through the admitting process. Once the patient had been admitted, I placed their name tag on. For any children, I applied Ametop gel to their hands to help reduce the pain when their cannula was inserted.

Once we had a phone call from the theatre staff requesting the next patient from the list, I walked them to theatre with the porter.

There was one theatre list for the morning and another for the afternoon. In between the two, I washed the beds and remade them ready for the next patient. I filed forms in the patients’ notes and played with the children if they were nervous.