Trainee GP
Kings College Hospital NHS Trust

00:00:07:01 – 00:00:11:03
Hi, my name is Kyaw, and I’m a doctor training to be a GP.

00:00:11:22 – 00:00:16:15
My job involves working at GP practice, seeing patients who come into the surgery

00:00:17:04 – 00:00:22:07
having consultations over the telephone and making house visits.

00:00:24:06 – 00:00:26:07
It’s very long hours – I get in at 8.30

00:00:26:07 – 00:00:29:12
I don’t finish until 6:30 and it’s pretty much nonstop.

00:00:31:15 – 00:00:34:04
I think one of the best things about being a GP

00:00:34:11 – 00:00:37:05
is that you don’t know who’s going to walk in through that door so

00:00:37:05 – 00:00:40:02
you don’t know what cases you’re going to be presented with.

00:00:40:09 – 00:00:45:10
It might be a simple call to a skin rash to someone expressing chest pain

00:00:45:12 – 00:00:49:12
so that variety is always interesting and always keeps things fresh.

00:00:50:23 – 00:00:53:00
The drawbacks are the long hours.

00:00:53:02 – 00:00:55:04
It’s the constant pressure.

00:00:55:04 – 00:00:59:03
But you tend to work in teams, as you do in a lot of medicine,

00:00:59:14 – 00:01:02:11
and just the interactions with your team members

00:01:03:03 – 00:01:05:00
just really helps you to get through the day.

00:01:06:23 – 00:01:10:00
I’ve taken a very unconventional route into medicine.

00:01:10:01 – 00:01:11:23
I didn’t really enjoy school.

00:01:11:23 – 00:01:13:06
I was never good at exams.

00:01:13:06 – 00:01:16:21
I sat through GCSEs and A-levels, did very badly,

00:01:17:07 – 00:01:19:03
but managed to scrape into university somehow.

00:01:19:03 – 00:01:24:05
For my A-levels, I chose biology, chemistry and maths I think

00:01:24:05 – 00:01:29:05
I did a degree in biotechnology, which is completely unrelated to medicine.

00:01:29:11 – 00:01:31:14
I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.

00:01:31:16 – 00:01:35:21
And then I went on to do a masters in IT – again had no idea

00:01:36:20 – 00:01:39:07
what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go.

00:01:39:08 – 00:01:43:01
So I then spent the next seven to ten years of my twenties

00:01:43:01 – 00:01:45:18
just travelling around, doing odd jobs, living in different countries.

00:01:45:22 – 00:01:48:19
And it wasn’t until my early thirties

00:01:48:19 – 00:01:52:10
I’d say that I thought, I want to pursue medicine.

00:01:53:18 – 00:01:56:13
I think the first thing I’d say is resilience.

00:01:56:17 – 00:01:58:18
You are going to encounter failures

00:01:59:04 – 00:02:02:15
either on a professional level, on a personal level, you will fail exams

00:02:03:01 – 00:02:07:12
and you’ve got to have that inner core of belief in yourself

00:02:07:15 – 00:02:11:05
and to have that stubbornness and just to get through it.

00:02:11:19 – 00:02:14:08
So resilience, I think you’re going

00:02:14:08 – 00:02:17:08
to be working in teams throughout your medical career

00:02:17:12 – 00:02:20:11
and sometimes you might encounter people you don’t get on with

00:02:20:16 – 00:02:22:18
You’ve just got to be professional about it.

00:02:22:18 – 00:02:26:22
And yeah, and learn how to work with people and have empathy

00:02:27:04 – 00:02:28:09
with not only your colleagues

00:02:28:09 – 00:02:30:23
but more importantly, your patients

00:02:31:00 – 00:02:34:12
And the most important thing is never lose sight of the fact that you’re there

00:02:34:18 – 00:02:37:10
to help your patients.

00:02:39:10 – 00:02:40:19
For my own experience, what I want to say is that it’s OK, it’s

00:02:40:19 – 00:02:42:21
OK that you don’t know what you want to do

00:02:42:21 – 00:02:45:23
when you’re in your early twenties, or in your mid twenties or even late thirties.

00:02:45:23 – 00:02:48:02
I think there are always options out there.

00:02:48:02 – 00:02:53:18
And if you if you have, you know, you set your mind to it, you will get there somehow.