Hello and thank you for finding your way here! I hope this finds you well. As my first official post, I wanted to give an introduction to this site and the landscape of my medical career so far. Most people don’t really know what is involved in medical training or the paths that doctors take, so I thought that this would be a good place to start and provides a background about me and my qualifications.
My name is Lorna – a proud Scot, medical doctor and GP registrar (training to be a General Practitioner or Family Doctor). I went straight from secondary school into medical school at 17 years old and attended The University of Edinburgh College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine. I spent 5 years there from 2010-2015, learning all there was to know about the human body and what can go wrong within, then ventured out into the wide world as a fledgling doctor. It seems so long ago now and so much has happened in between, but I still remember the potent mixture of fear and excitement on my first day as a practising physician… Queue some significant imposter syndrome: I was 22 years old and holding people’s lives in my hands.
That leads us to the Foundation Programme, which are the 2 mandatory years of general training that UK doctors go through after medical school in order to become fully registered with the General Medical Council or GMC (the medical governing body) and be able to apply for specialty training. In Foundation Year 1 (FY1), you are provisionally registered until you meet all the competencies required from your first year. Then, before entering FY2, you receive full GMC registration with a licence to practice – this means that you can legally work unsupervised in a clinical setting and expand your practice a little, if you want (e.g. locum or private work). Although how anyone has the energy to do that around an already demanding rota, I will never know!
I completed my FY years in the East of Scotland and these were some of the most difficult years of my life to date, not just from a professional point of view but a personal one as well. There were many times where I thought I wouldn’t be able to see it through but I survived in (roughly) one piece and I think that having a support system was one of the main reasons that I did. I worked in a variety of settings, from Gastroenterology to General Surgery to Acute Medicine and even got some experience in Neonates (babies) and General Practice. However, on reaching the end of my Foundation training, I still wasn’t sure where in medicine I belonged and needed some time to soul search and, given the challenges I had faced, decide whether I could see myself continuing along this career path.
Next came an exciting adventure: in 2017, we jetted off to live and work in New Zealand, a country that holds a special place in my heart. My partner and I lived on the North Island for a year and a half, slotting our incredible adventures around a busy work schedule in a mixture of Medicine, Surgery and A&E. New Zealand is such a beautiful country with kind, warm people, a rich culture and a real respect for the natural world. Needless to say, I was hooked. And although we decided to come back to the UK to complete our specialty training, we have plans to return and live there again one day in the future.
During my time in New Zealand, I began to develop a real interest in Public Health, given the health inequities evident between populations, and Lifestyle Medicine. After some research, I enrolled in and completed the Diploma & Board Certification in Lifestyle Medicine with the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine (ASLM) and co-issued by the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine (BSLM), which changed the way I thought about conventional medicine. This interest is what really sparked the idea for this platform: a platform where evidence-based medicine and research can be made accessible to all, allowing people to optimise their own health through small changes to the way they live.
On returning to the UK, I did some locum work to keep the bank balance ticking over, while applying to specialty training programmes. As a result, I secured a place in the General Practice Specialty Training scheme in the South East of Scotland, starting in 2019. At the time of writing this, I am now halfway through my second year of GP training (GPST2).
Who knows where things will go from here but as I follow my interests more, my purpose becomes more apparent. I only hope that this platform proves valuable to others and I look forward to sharing more soon!