Improving my clinical skills

Dear Prof Ingkran,

Your special study module, 'Make Your Clinical Skills Better', is, in my honest opinion, the most useless special study module (ssm) a 5th year medical student at the University of Dundee can choose.

This is supposed to be a CLINICAL ssm, not a theme ssm, and therefore, I see no reason as to why I have to present to you a reflective essay on the 12 Dundee medical school outcomes upon which you are going to base my assessment.

Oh wait, hang on. The reason I have to write this essay is because there is really no other way you can assess my clinical skills, is that right? If my clinical skills are crap and there's no one to give me ADVICE or TEACH me new techniques or maybe just OBSERVE me examining patients on the ward and then give me FEEDBACK on how I can actually improve my clinical skills, what's the point of this silly SSM.

If you are going to base my assessment on an essay, I might as well stay at home REFLECTING on the most worthless 5 days I've ever had in medical school and work on the essay instead of showing my face at 0900 till 1700 on the wards. To be honest, I'd rather spend the next 3 weeks watching the grass in the backyard grow instead of wasting my time with this silly ssm.

Yup, the key word is REFLECTING. It's a compulsory word in the vocabulary of any Dundee medical student. In fact, REFLECTING is more important than LEARNING or KNOWLEDGE. I think it's pure rubbish. The only thing that I've ever learnt from reflecting is that I shouldn't waste so much time doing it and instead spend the time writing fictional essays on how reflecting has helped me because these are really important and my grades depend on them.

5th year medical students in Dundee are supposed to spend their final year REFLECTING on their core competencies. What core competencies? Half the 5th years don't even know how to palpate an abdomen properly. Reflecting on core INcompetencies is good, isn't it? If more time was spent instilling the core competencies into medical students, instead of teaching us how to reflect on them, we wouldn't need to reflect on our core competencies to improve them, would we? Reflection is an aid to learning, not a SUBSTITUTE. Please get that into your head Prof Ingkran.

In addition, I would like to suggest that the medical education department carry out a survey amongst the final year students to poll their opinion on all this reflection bullshit. This survey should be completely anonymous and sent out online. But wait, our opinion doesn't matter, does it? That's because we're medical students and we don't really know the best way medical education should be done. You folk ought to know best. And after all, the decisions that really matter aren't made by people with REAL medical degrees.

Yours in good faith,

Casey.