For the last 3 years CIPHER Medical has been supporting the Newcastle University Medical School MBBS programme, offering a unique placement opportunity in event and pre-hospital emergency medicine. Medical students in their 3rd and 4th years of study choose Student Selected Component placements. These SSCs enable students to develop ideas about their own future specialisms and potential areas of practice. CIPHER medical offer 4-week placements for Newcastle students, helping to move them beyond the qualification’s core curriculum and giving them additional experience in wider clinical care options, offering a mix of frontline ambulance NHS work and event medicine work. High fidelity critical care simulation and education is also delivered.
The recent training involved familiarising the students with the equipment we have on our ambulances, and training them in treating traumatic injuries, moving and handling patients, assisting paramedics with Advanced Life Support scenarios, and finished with some moulages/simulations of potential injuries. The students themselves were enthusiastic and interested in CIPHER Medical’s provision and services, and made the most of the opportunity offered.
To date, a total of 25 students have participated in this additional training opportunity and, as the following feedback shows, it has been universally positive and will play a continuing role in the training of the medics of the future.
“I really enjoyed my placement at CIPHER and would recommend it to any medical student interested in pre-hospital or emergency medicine. I thought the training we received was useful and I found it helpful that we had an extra day of training in the middle of our placement, which also allowed us to discuss interesting or challenging jobs with other students in our cohort.
I really enjoyed the Tough Mudder weekend event and found that the team would go out of their way to provide teaching and show me round the course.”
I also wanted to say that everyone I met on the different shifts were all really lovely and more than willing to let me get involved on the jobs and answer any questions I had.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed the training. It was an excellent experience to have. As ambulance workers play such a big part of the ‘patient journey’, as a future doctor looking after those patients, it was invaluable to spend time seeing exactly what it is that paramedics and ECAs do, and what kind of care, treatment, assessment etc is done before someone gets to hospital before they are handed over to the hospital team – which I will be part of over the next few years as I complete foundation and beyond.
It was very well organised and took into account our preferences, which was very helpful to work around pre-arranged commitments eg paid work.
The training was excellent, especially the simulations. I feel far more confident now performing life support/first aid and this was a key reason I wanted to do the SSC as I felt I was lacking in this area. It was great that we did both events and ambulance shifts.”
CIPHER Medical’s CEO, Andy Thomas, says of the support given to the programme, “We started these placements to give medical students a unique insight not only into prehospital care and event medicine, but also show them the unique things we do as an independent ambulance provider. This hopefully gives them a bespoke clinical experience not afforded by hospital placements and some robust prehospital care training. We are proud we are able to support medical students in addition to the paramedic and nursing students that we support.”
