Students joining NHS feel 'nervous but excited'

Students coming to the end of training to be the next generation of doctors in the West Midlands say they are feeling "nervous but excited" about joining the NHS.

The publicly-funded health system has faced difficulties for many years, including long waiting lists for many operations, an increase in demand for services and more recently strikes by resident doctors.

However, medical students at Aston University said they feel "prepared" to join hospitals around the region once they finish their studies.

"I feel like it's quite inherent to feel nervous when you know there is a challenge upcoming, but it's something I am quite excited to tackle," final year student, Alaa Djerouni said.

"I feel like I've had adequate preparation for it, and I'm really looking forward to it."

Others from Aston Medical School have been explaining why they chose to study medicine and pursue a career with the NHS.

Second year student Andrea Susane Paul said: "Medicine, I believe, is a vocation and I've always had scientific drive back from when I was at school.

"I carried out some work experience with GP practitioners. I think watching patient care being delivered in real time, and watching the satisfaction the doctor gets, made me realise this is where I want to be."

The curriculum for students at Aston focuses on a patient-centred approach, with a high-tech clinical skills centre that includes a range of equipment and life size anatomical models.

Students said training with those models helps to transition into working for the NHS and interacting with real patients.

Jordan Jennings said: "Once you get used to it, it becomes a lot more settled.

"It's such useful experience to have before going into third year, because going into wards rather than have that initial fear of what am I doing, I have a sense of I know where things are."

Staff from the school say they explain the pressures the NHS is under to students, but emphasise the importance of having a nationally-funded heath service.

John Cookson, dean of medical education, said: "I think the idea of a nationally funded universal - universal is the important word - service for everybody, so no matter your background, you're in the same bed alongside somebody else who's from a completely different background but you're having the same high level management of treatment that everybody else has.

"As soon as you go elsewhere, you discover, as our students do when they go on electives, they come back and say, 'Thank god for the NHS'."

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