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Notes -
I've finally finished the exam I've been crying about for months, and I feel.. empty.
I'm not even relieved, or depressed, I just feel like I'm about to break into a fever or come down with the flu, which very well might be the case given how many people on my cattle-class flight were coughing their lungs out.
The exam has two parts, a Situational Judgement Test, which is supposed to be a test of your ability to adhere to the standards of ethics and probity expected of a doctor, but achieves nothing like that at all, and a Clinical Dilemma section, which is about what you'd expect.
The worst I could say about the CD is that the questions were fucking vague. As in, when you ask me the "most appropriate" test to order for someone, do you want me to order the first fucking thing I'm supposed to or, or are we imagining a spherical cow in an MRI? For that to mean something, you need to specify the setting, at the very least, which many questions didn't, and ideally ask specifically what the first test should be, then what you might use to screen further, and finally the most specific/confirmatory one. Not just "most appropriate".
But the SJT? I was inclined to believe that the UK doctors bitching about it were slightly exaggerating when they called it a random number generator that also counts for half your score. They weren't wrong, not one bit.
The dilemmas ranged from headscratchers to utterly psychotic. The funniest, which had me chuckling out loud, involved a fellow doctor who was wheelchair bound due to motor neurone disease complaining to you how sad he is that he can't access the doctor's mess that's up a spiral staircase, so he's forced to have lunch in the public mess.
Like, all well and good Dr. Stephen Hawking, how is that my problem?
I was still presented with a list of options, from the profoundly unhelpful like telling him, dawg, you're a cripple, dafuq do you expect? to telling him that it is beyond my capabilities to physically move the mess somewhere else.
Since I was expected to rank the options in order of good to bad, I ended up picking "accompany him for lunch in the public mess" as my top pick. Why. Am I expected to do that indefinitely?Second pick was "ask him how I could help", which brings to mind me dragging him up a flight of stairs.
There wasn't even any option for something half sensible, like going to HR or Occupational Health and asking for disability accommodations for the poor bastard, or even telling him to ask for it instead.
Hell, I'm not sure why a doctor with MND is employed in the first place. If I ever become brain dead and on indefinite ventilator support (more exams like this risk an aneurysm anyway), then I'll ensure my next of kin demand I get my standard wage for the valuable job I'm doing lying there and keeping a bed warm.
Is the NHS so poor that they are using medieval castles as hospitals now? I'm pretty sure spiral staircases have been illegal in new-build private dwellings for like 50 years, and don't think I've been in a hospital that doesn't have, um, elevators? Like, really big ones -- it's kind of a hospital thing IME.
There are still some very old Victorian hospitals in use, and while wards are certainly accessible with elevators I suppose some rooms used for staff rest might not be.
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