As much as I love General Practice, starting my medical career on a General Practice rotation is quite possibly the most difficult thing I have ever done.
When you start out on a ward in a hospital rotation, you get orientated to the ward and procedures and routines, and although it may take you some time to get your head around everything and get into the swing of things, with a little help from your more experienced colleagues, you eventually find you groove.
With General Practice however, nothing and nobody can prepare you for what's about to come through the clinic doors. Because nobody knows.
The day-to-day variations is one of the more wonderful and exciting things about General Practice. However, when you're a junior doctor on your first day of practice out in the real world, the last thing you want is variation. Instead, you crave stability, dependability, and reproducibility; all of which are absent in GP-Land, where every patient you see is an entirely different clinical conundrum.
Today, I went from seeing a geriatric patient to a paediatric patient to a patient with a fractured foot to a patient with a skin lesion to a patient with reduced hearing to a patient with leukaemia. No pattern whatsoever. No way to prepare for what's to come.
All I can say is, by the end of this 20 weeks, I've got no choice but to become a phenomenally outstanding clinician.
This is it. It's sink or swim time.
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