CMSA Accreditations: None
Rural Allowance: Yes
Duration of Rotation: 12 months
Doctors Quarters:
- No comments yet.
Academics:
- Non-existent except for that which you di for yourself. Get up to 10 days of academic leave
- It’s very much up to yourself!
- They have the occasional esmo but otherwise academics are virtually absent.
- Bundu medicine mostly practised here. No teaching. You have to learn on your own.
Supervision:
- Poor to none.
- Little to no supervision. When I was there the MOs were mostly available if you needed to ask for guidance.
- Mostly community service officers and a couple of grade 1 MOs the only senior MOs tend to be based in obs and gynae.
- None existent.
Clinical Exposure:
- You literally see everything. Even though you can’t necessarily manage it properly and referring to appropriate facilities is a mission.
- A wide variety of clinical exposure. I got quite a bit of anaesthesia (unsupervised) and surgical (only c/s and laparotomy for ectopics)
- You see pretty much everything as you call from casualty and cover the whole hospital and emergency c sections and ectopics… its a busy hospital so it was great for gaining a wide range of experience but you will be busy.
- You see everything but can’t manage it properly.
Departments worked in:
- Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Emergency Department - If you’re willing to do O&G you’ll get loads of cutting and anaesthetic time, but unfortunately it does not count towards any further academic qualifications as the facility has no supervison and is not qualified/registered for any qualification ms.
- Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Anaesthetics, Emergency Department - See above
- Internal Medicine, Surgery, Orthopaedics, Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Anaesthetics, Psychiatry, ARV clinic, Emergency Department, OPD’s - They force you to rotate every 4 months and you don’t get much say… The departments are male mixed ward (everything medical surgical orthopaedic psychiatric etc) and female mixed wards, obstetric ward, paediatrics(includes main paeds and baby room), OPD (mixed busy gateway like clinic seeing non urgent casualty patients and referrals during the day… Insanely busy) and HIV clinic. During the week the different departments are given different days to send a person to theatre to assist with c sections. You could be cutting assisting or doing the anaesthetics depending on what you want to do. You can get cutting time if you are keen.
- Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, OPD’s
Social Scene:
- 2020 is not a good year to use as a benchmark due to COVID-19.
- Secunda always have groups of young engineers who have social circles which you can join. I lived in a commune with some engineers which was quite fun.
- It’s very close to Secunda which has a mall with movies and restaurants. The other community service doctors become like family.
- Social status is fair.
Additional Comments:
- "Would not recommend.
Management is poor. In my year we were 12 CSMOs, 8 sync and 4 async, two junior MOs (immediately post comserve ) and two senior MOs.
Calls were tough with postcall only being allowed at 14h00.
Many basic services not available (no LMAs, no infusion pumps, ECG not working most of the time, blood gas hardly ever working). " - "Would not recommend, but if you do end up there, it’s a sink or swim experience.
If there was a little more supervision and less politics it could be good hospital.
Referring to Witbank is a soul sucking experience. " - Would not advise.
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