A term placement
Henry Sanicola, a University of Queensland medical student, completed a term placement with Dr Cutbush over the 2015 Christmas term break.
Placements of this kind let a student see a subspecialty practice in a way that a rotation through a general unit does not, from the clinic through to the operating theatre.
How surgical training is structured in Australia
A medical degree in Australia runs for four to six years depending on the programme, and the later years are spent largely in hospitals on clinical rotations. Orthopaedics usually appears as a block of a few weeks within a wider surgical rotation, which is enough time to learn the common fractures and not much more.
After graduation come an intern year and one or more resident years, then selection onto a specialist training programme, then several years as a registrar, then the fellowship examinations of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. Subspecialty fellowship training, in shoulder surgery for instance, comes after all of that. A student on placement is at the very beginning of a long sequence.
Why elective placements matter
An elective placement arranged in a student's own time, as this one was, fills a gap the formal curriculum cannot. A student in a general unit sees a sample of everything. A student attached to a subspecialty practice sees the same conditions repeatedly, and repetition is how the pattern recognition that underlies clinical examination is built. The difference between a rotator cuff problem and a stiff shoulder is far easier to learn when both walk through the door the same morning.
A placement also shows a student what the work is actually like: the proportion of the week spent in clinic rather than in theatre, how a patient is assessed before an operation is offered, how often the conclusion is that no operation is needed, and how a practice is run. Students weighing up a surgical career are better served by seeing that than by reading about it. Students on placement observe and do not treat, and individual results vary, with every patient seen in clinic assessed on their own circumstances.
Related information
See also our other medical student placement post and our post on lecturing medical students, along with our shoulder fellowship and consultation pages.