January 12, 2015, by studentcontributor

An educational weekend away!

Hi everyone, it’s Andrea again, hope you’re having a good 2015 so far! In this post, I am going to tell you about my experience at a medical conference.

BMedSci research project

At Nottingham, all medical students complete a research project during their third year in an area of their choice, this can vary from work in a lab to being involved in more clinical work with patients. This project is written up in a 10,000-word dissertation and forms a large chunk of your BMedSci degree. My area of choice was paediatrics, specifically the care of newborn babies. My project involved improving the accuracy of assessing heart rate during the care of newborn babies, and our results showed that the new method we proposed was actually very good!

Medical conference in Barcelona

At a medical conference, lots of healthcare professionals from around the world gather to present exciting new research and discuss new ideas that will hopefully improve patient care in the future. Due to the success of our project, we submitted our findings to a paediatrics conference in Barcelona, and were accepted. This meant an extended weekend trip to Spain with the rest of the research department and the opportunity to speak in front of hundreds of paediatricians about what we had found!

Conference presentation

My presentation was part of a session on neonatal resuscitation, and it was pretty cool to meet so many experts on the topic, as well as the authors of many books and papers I had read when researching for my dissertation! I’m quite a nervous public speaker, so was terrified by the size of the audience, especially as they were all far more qualified than me! However, I managed to deliver a relatively confident and coherent speech, and field all the questions I was asked by the audience without too much of a problem. It was great to know that doctors from around the world were as excited about our results as we were, and we hope this means that our new method will eventually be used as standard care for all newborn babies.

As well as attending many interesting talks and workshops, the trip was also a great opportunity to get to know other members of the research department and meet people from around the world. It was also great to explore a new city and do some sightseeing, Barcelona was definitely a welcome change from Nottingham!

Taking part in research as a medical student gives you a great insight into how it works, and if you manage to present your findings at a conference or get them published in a medical journal, it can also be a great boost to your CV!

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Find out more about the Heartlight: Newborn Resuscitation project at The University of Nottingham.

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