The General Medical Council is wondering whether more courses should be run like this and whether members of the public would come forward as guinea pigs if that were the case.
Just to respond to what you were saying on Lake Cocytus. if you’re a law student and you want to work in CAMHS, you’d probably be better off doing a social work diploma than a medicine degree.
Your law background would stand you in good stead for social work, you’d have less extra years of training so you’d get to where you want to be quicker and accumulate less debt along the way, and a newly-qualified social worker earns roughly the same as a newly-qualified doctor.
Obviously as a social worker you wouldn’t be able to diagnose or prescribe meds, but in child and adolescent mental health that’s often quite a small part of the interventions anyway. There probably would, however, be opportunities for you to train in things like cognitive-behaviour therapy and family therapy.
A lot of the psychiatric SHOs that I work with tend not to enjoy CAMHS because they feel that they’ve spent all these years training in medicine only to do a mix of psychology and social work. As a result they tend to leg it to elderly psychiatry so they can do more of the actual medical stuff.
I just thought I’d mention it as a possible thought for you. If you want to discuss careers in CAMHS further, feel free to drop me a line on zarathustra at mentalnurse dot org dot uk
I think earlier exposure to patients can definitely be beneficial for med students and get them more conversant in treating the person and not just the symptoms. Good stuff.
(This is presuming a suitable framework of supervision and guidance is provided for the soon-to-be-docs).
I think I’d have to agree with you there. Medical students get to communicate with patients in a hospital setting already, but a community setting is much different to a hospital.
prout de jure 
Hi Oliver
Just to respond to what you were saying on Lake Cocytus. if you’re a law student and you want to work in CAMHS, you’d probably be better off doing a social work diploma than a medicine degree.
Your law background would stand you in good stead for social work, you’d have less extra years of training so you’d get to where you want to be quicker and accumulate less debt along the way, and a newly-qualified social worker earns roughly the same as a newly-qualified doctor.
Obviously as a social worker you wouldn’t be able to diagnose or prescribe meds, but in child and adolescent mental health that’s often quite a small part of the interventions anyway. There probably would, however, be opportunities for you to train in things like cognitive-behaviour therapy and family therapy.
A lot of the psychiatric SHOs that I work with tend not to enjoy CAMHS because they feel that they’ve spent all these years training in medicine only to do a mix of psychology and social work. As a result they tend to leg it to elderly psychiatry so they can do more of the actual medical stuff.
I just thought I’d mention it as a possible thought for you. If you want to discuss careers in CAMHS further, feel free to drop me a line on zarathustra at mentalnurse dot org dot uk
I think earlier exposure to patients can definitely be beneficial for med students and get them more conversant in treating the person and not just the symptoms. Good stuff.
(This is presuming a suitable framework of supervision and guidance is provided for the soon-to-be-docs).
I think I’d have to agree with you there. Medical students get to communicate with patients in a hospital setting already, but a community setting is much different to a hospital.