 What is up guys? Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. If you're new to the channel, hi, my name is Nasser and I'm now a third year medical student studying at King's College London. Actually, I might be a fourth year medical student now, but we'll get into that later on in the video. This is going to be like a quick update video because a lot of things are changing. A lot is happening day to day and it's getting kind of crazy. I feel like I need to sit down and get everything that's going on in my head in one place so I can figure out where to move on from here. So for the last six weeks, I've been on clinical placement assigned to the neurology team at one of the hospitals here in London and I've kind of watched as the hospitals have gone from having one coronavirus case in the country to one coronavirus case in a nearby hospital to one coronavirus case in our actual hospital and then multiple coronavirus cases all over the place. And the peak of that for me as a third year medical student was when last Thursday we got sent home from placement because there were too many patients with confirmed coronavirus in the hospital and they didn't want to put us at increased risk if we didn't need to be there. So let me give you guys an update about my medical school, King's College London. You know what is happening here in response to the coronavirus pandemic regarding lectures, our exams, clinical placement and everything. So after we got sent home last Thursday, the next morning we received an email from King's letting us know that all placements had been suspended until further notice. Now I still have an entire block of clinical placement before the end of my third year of medical school. It's supposed to be in trauma and accidents, which I was actually really, really excited to do. You know, it's a high intensity area. There's going to be so many different presentations coming into the hospital and I was excited to learn. I was excited to experience that and just develop myself as a student doctor. But unfortunately it doesn't look like that's going to happen anymore. That same Friday later on in the day, we got an email letting us know that all of our upcoming lectures are going to be delivered online. And then today we received a really important update. As far as clinical placements go, they are still suspended and they're telling us we should not attend placement at this time so that clinical staff actually can focus on treating patients in the hospital and not teaching students while we're there. Now they say that they're going to have alternative teaching arrangements to continue giving us clinical skills and clinical practice. But honestly, no matter what they do, it's not going to replace the experience of actually being in a hospital and gaining the first hand experience from there. No video that we watch online is going to replace our teaching that actually happens in a hospital. And then the really big and important announcement, which is that our Oskie Practical Medical School exams that were scheduled to happen in May have now been cancelled. Now, this is actually really big news. So these Oskies, the practical exams that we have in our medical school, they're a very important part of proving that students have the competency that they need in order to progress from one year to another. So it's kind of crazy that they've been cancelled. And because these types of exams involve bringing in actual patients or actors that we as medical students can then examine and talk to and present our findings and all of those things, we can't really do that online. Obviously, it makes sense that these would be cancelled if you were to bring in a patient and then have them examined by something like, I don't know, 100 medical students over the course of a day. Then that one patient is obviously going to be at increased risk and exposure to many, many medical students, most of which, like myself, have been on clinical placement for the last couple of weeks. And so obviously, it's not possible to put a patient or an actor at that increased risk. So these Oskies were the only remaining thing that us third year medical students were going to be assessed on for this year. And with that out of the way, we don't really have anything that we're studying for. We already wrote the written exam progress test seven back in January, which almost all medical students have passed. And so there isn't really anything else left for us to do. Now, for those students who failed that written test earlier in January, they have a chance to reset it later on in this year. But since that's not going to happen in a physical location, that's going to have to happen online. And we've heard some crazy rumors about how these exams are going to be implemented online. Apparently, while you write the test, you're going to be recorded via your video camera and listen to through your microphone. You're going to have to show the workspace in front of you, show that the door behind you is closed and show that you don't have any like earphones in your ear. So it's kind of really crazy. We're entering this very weird phase on top of that. Us medical students have this portfolio that we need to get filled in and signed off by the end of the year. It has all kinds of things that we need to do, clinical skills that we need to prove that we're competent at before we can graduate onto year four. But as far as we can tell, we're not going to have a chance to fill these things out because we can't go back to hospital to complete our placement. So things are really still up in the air. I mean, the medical school is sort of updating us as we go along and as they decide on different things. But there's so many things that are still left undecided. So all of our remaining teaching is online. We don't have any clinical placement to attend. And the only exams that we had remaining in this year have been canceled. So what does that mean? Am I a fourth year medical student? Have I graduated and finished my third year of medical school? I don't know. Today, when we heard the news that our exams have been canceled, all of the medic group chats were popping off. Everyone is saying that we have five months of holiday. Where should we fly to next? What am I going to do with all this free time? But unfortunately for me, I'm still writing the USMLE exam this year. And I still have so much work to do for that. It's an exam that's supposed to take you somewhere between six and nine months to study for. And I've been trying to do it in five. So I still have quite a lot of studying to do in the past couple of weeks. I've actually been struggling to balance medical school, YouTube studying for this exam and all the other commitments that I have in my life. So this has definitely taken a bit of a load off. It'll be really interesting to see what they do with our third year Oscar exam. Are they just going to shift the waiting onto next year or next year? Are they going to put this year's material on that exam? And then with clinical placement, honestly, I was quite excited to do my A&E rotation. I knew that it would be a really great learning experience and I would be able to do many things and observe lots of new conditions and presentations and things like that. But at the same time, I obviously understand that all the healthcare staff there is really, really busy and probably stretched quite thin. So they don't have time for medical students. And that's obviously really fair. And I guess that's all that we've heard from Kings. Everything is still kind of up in the air and we're just waiting for all the official announcements to see what's going to happen moving forward. All right. And that is it for me. Thank you guys for watching this update slash ramble video. I hope it was at least a little bit enjoyable. If you did enjoy this video, please don't forget to leave a like on it and subscribe to see more content from me in the future. And I will see you in the next one. Peace. That's the weirdest intro I've ever done for sure.