MBChB graduate Callum Cruickshank on a busy professional life after medical school.
What is your current role?
I am a few things:
- A core trainee in Psychiatry (currently in Psychiatry of Older Age (Monday-Wednesday)
- A clinical fellow in Medicine of the Elderly (MoE) liaison to Neurosurgery (Thursday/Friday)
- A trustee of the charity You Can Be A Doctor
- A Clinical Tutor Associate and an associate faculty member of the Clinical Educator program.
That’s a bit of an eclectic mix and it keeps me pretty busy but I really enjoy the variety and autonomy my work brings. There’s a lot of crossover between psychiatry and MoE so I’m able to bring bits of both to the other specialty and to develop the overlap.
This kind of split is pretty unusual and you have to have a clear idea of what you want to do to set something like this up. If you’ve got an idea for something like this or even just can’t decide between two specialities, you should go for it! Don’t feel you have to go down the traditional route of training if it doesn’t suit you.
I’ve been working in Widening Participation since 2014 and I really enjoy the sense of satisfaction that working with You Can Be A Doctor brings. Often, you’re doing something that is quite easy but makes a huge difference to the people you’re supporting. It’s all about interacting with people and finding out about them which is much more similar to medicine than you might think!
What have you been up to since graduation?
I did the academic foundation program in South East Scotland after graduating working across Fife and Lothian in a variety of jobs. In FY2 I did MoE, psychiatry and neurology which was perfect for me as these were the three specialities I was most interested in. I enjoyed all three but you can probably guess from my current job that I wanted to work in MoE and Psych.
I then did two years as a clinical fellow in MoE and, during this time, rewrote the rota and started new services in MoE Liaison to Neurosurgery and a multidisciplinary team doing in-patient diagnosis of dementia as well as working across the MoE wards proper, ortho-geriatrics and some time in hospital based complex clinical care.
I also did the Clinical Educator Program up to Level 3 which is a qualification in medical education and, eventually, ended up contributing to one of the courses. I am now involved in facilitating sessions.
Working for You Can Be A Doctor and doing some medical education really helps to develop a broad range of skills in management and communication which end up being very helpful in medicine too and have definitely helped me to set up my current post. I didn’t think I was going to end up doing all this when I was a student and I’ve only realised the possibilities that working as a doctor brings over time.
I really enjoy my specialties but the other stuff that I do is at least as interesting and has carried over from medical school too. Medicine is so broad that you’ll be able to find an application for pretty much any skill you have and combining it with you medical knowledge can be really rewarding!
