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Life After Duke-NUS

It has been more than a year since I graduated from Duke-NUS. For the past year, I was in the transition year residency program, putting in long hours and surmounting the many potentially traumatic calls. It was a year of literally backbreaking but rewarding training which took me through rotations such as general surgery, internal medicine, emergency medicine, obstetrics and gynecology. Despite all this, graduation paradoxically still feels like it happened yesterday.

On introspection, perhaps it is because I am a SingHealth resident which puts me in continued contact with Duke-NUS, her students, most of my classmates as well as our Duke-NUS clinical faculty. Residency feels like a seamless continuation of my education at Duke-NUS. This also shows the high level of integration our students have with clinical teams, the graded responsibility, close interaction and supervision by our clinical faculty such that the transition from student to resident is smooth.                                                                                                                                      

Starting out in my transition year, well-armed with four years of Duke-NUS medical education, I quickly realized that knowledge is no substitute for clinical experience. While knowledge is essential, clinical experience demonstrates that not all knowledge is the same. In general, medical education seeks to expose medical students to the entire domain knowledge of medicine, on facts, numbers and even obscure data. But it was after graduation, as a medical resident, that I quickly learned that it was more important to have knowledge of commonly encountered conditions and treatment protocols close at hand. Good people skills with patients and nurses became crucial for surviving a call. After all, uncommon ailments can always be looked up, and diagnostic blind-spots identified by the team or by decision support algorithms.

Despite going through three graduation ceremonies (two were for my engineering degrees, and the third for my medical studies), I’m still far from being fully trained. Since July 2012, I started my first year of radiology residency. My initial concern regarding the loss of patient contact was well compensated by the diagnostic and intellectual challenge in radiology. As a radiology resident, training is like a trip back to the days of a medical student where I have to quickly assimilate huge amounts of knowledge and overcome the steep learning curve in acquiring a new set of skills. The case-mix and learning opportunities were plentiful, given the high clinical load that is unique to training in SingHealth. I am currently training under the supervision of dedicated consultants who never fail to challenge and encourage me.

Besides Radiology, I am active in the Singapore Medical Association (SMA). I chair the SMA doctors-in-training committee and together with the committee members, we are bound by the common vision of helping fellow house officers, medical officers, registrars, basic and advance specialty trainees and residents alike, be the voice and address concerns faced in the course of our daily work. This helps us serve patients at our best while we train in a reasonable and safe environment.

Since graduating from Duke-NUS, my clinical experience made me understand and appreciate the value of our curriculum. Although compressed and compact, the holistic four-year education emphasized not just clinical knowledge but also the important skills of doctoring such as communication, ethics, professionalism and research, which put our graduates on a trajectory to become future change agents. As second-year medical students, it was difficult for us then, to appreciate the ethics course, especially while we were in the midst of clinical rotations.

However, since joining the profession, working in the wards and volunteering my time in the SMA, I soon found myself often drawing upon the pearls of wisdom that our faculty Dr. Thirumoorthy imparted. Becoming a doctor goes well beyond knowing how to diagnose and treat a patient. It is also about knowing how to wield this privilege responsibly.

I look forward to continue giving back to Duke-NUS. As an alumnus, I see myself actively involved in teaching her students and working closely with the alumni to strengthen and advocate for Duke-NUS. In so doing, help position Duke-NUS to effect positive changes to medical education, training and by extension, the Singapore healthcare system.

Dr. Chia Ghim Song is a first-year Radiology resident at SingHealth and Duke-NUS MD Graduate (2011).

Extracted from Duke-NUS' Vital Science January 2013