Transitioning to full-time medicine education involves not just a shift in routine but careful financial planning. Here’s how final year student, Susan Poots, navigated the transition from part-time to full-time learning in year-four of HCP-Med.
Managing financially
When I started full-time medical education, I felt ready to stop splitting my brain between work/family and academic life. My cohort had made our financial plans for university before the cost-of-living crisis, so when mortgage rates increased some of my cohort were obliged to work more hours than they would have liked, taking on locum shifts during weekends and holidays. If you have already paid off some years of your mortgage it may be possible to increase the term to reduce payments in the short term. Students are eligible to apply for student loans, and the award for the final year of medical school is slightly increased. I did look at bursaries via the University of Edinburgh website but there were none that I met the criteria for. I would say it is certainly worth a look. There are also some prizes in fifth and final year which could be a way of clawing back some finance.
Students are also entitled to a travel bursary each year of £300 and £200 which can help with costs. As I did not take up the offer of accommodation in peripheral placements due to my caring responsibilities, I was able to claim further travel expenses if they were 20 miles from my home and Edinburgh. Making sure that you take a packed lunch, and having your own coffee and mug at placement is an important way of saving money as buying food and drink on placement sites is expensive.
Adapting to the full-time programme
I did enjoy the release of splitting my brain two ways instead of three when I stopped working. I was not expecting the transition to on campus learning to be hard and it wasn’t. As fifth and final year are largely placement orientated the time spent on campus is minimal and tends to be at the beginning of a block, or for specific clinical skills sessions.
In final year I would say there is even less time on campus. Many of the tutorials for the GP block are live on teams, and there are some live on teams for the surgical block too. The other learning is a mixture of teaching activity at your placement site and online asynchronous materials.
I would say that I have not been able to take up much of the social side of university at all. This is in part due to the fact that I had chosen not to move to Edinburgh and due to my family commitments. I do however continue to feel close to my HCP-Med colleagues and we meet up as a group. There are so many social and educational opportunities for medical students at Edinburgh, you can be involved in so much if you want to.
Biggest change
The main change about the final two years is really about the proportion of time spent on placement learning. I was ready for this and learn best when in real life situations with patients. For me I had less experience of some of the technical skills such as cannulation and venepuncture than a lot of the HCP-Med cohort so there has been more time to practice these.
There have been some tricky aspects of transitioning to full-time learning, and I hope these insights can give you some ideas about how to prepare for that stage of the HCP-Med programme when you reach it.
