Final year Queen Mary medical students join front line teams at the Royal London Hospital

Osama Omrani. Credit: Osama Omrani

The students have recently been awarded their medical degrees and registered several months early with the General Medical Council as doctors. They were inducted into the Royal London Hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and A&E teams at the end of March.

Here one of the team, Osama Omrani, shares his experience of his first few weeks on the front line of the fight against coronavirus.

Where are you working now?

For the last few weeks, I have been working in the Adult Critical Care Unit in the Royal London Hospital, along with a team of final year medical students. We have organised ourselves, with the help of Professor Rupert Pearse, into a team that is able to support many aspects of critical care, particularly as the Covid-19 situation continues to develop.

What does a typical day look like for you?

We have a continuously evolving rota that dictates where I am on a daily basis, designed to match the needs of the unit as they become clear. Recently, I have spent a significant amount of time supporting the Critical Care Outreach Team. This specialist service is called to support other medical teams across the hospital when a patient becomes more unwell. I contribute by acting as the right-hand man for the critical care nurse that is on call, going out to see patients we are called to, assisting with examining and treating patients, documenting and liaising with other teams. This has been an incredibly rewarding experience and I have felt warmly welcomed, as I have across all parts of ACCU.

I have also been assisting with data collation, as ongoing audit and research is a vital component of the ongoing battle with SARS-CoV-2. This has involved entering clinical data into our digital database as part of national research efforts, as well as donning PPE in order to manually retrieve some clinical information that is only available at the patient bedside.

As a team, we also contribute by assisting the ACCU medical and nursing teams during the day shift, as well as supporting ancillary teams such as the pharmacists, clinical technologists and dieticians. 

What is your clinical background?

I am a final year medical student who has entered a truly strange period in my education; we have officially passed our final exams, awarded our MBBS and have applied for provisional registration as doctors with the General Medical Council. I will be joining the Homerton University Hospital in August for the first year of my Academic Foundation Programme, before moving to the Royal London Hospital for FY2. 

How will your experience working on the frontline inform what you do next in your career?

The experience has given me almost limitless respect for every component of critical care, particularly the nurses, who are truly near-superhuman. It’s inspiring to be around incredible leaders in the form of the ITU consultants, who manage to find pragmatic solutions to the endless questions and problems they are faced with on a daily basis. I hope to carry the lessons learned from this experience into the early days of my training, and hope that it may play an important role in shaping the kind of doctor I hope to become.

More information:

• For the latest Queen Mary coronavirus advice and updates please read our dedicated webpage