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Jellybean 066 with Claire and Saskia

What is it like to be a student volunteer at SMACC? Claire and Saskia (@saskia_port) talk about how they ended up working at #dasSMACC. It’s a story of humour, verve, enthusiasm and a little bit of teasing of the Professor of Emergency Medicine at St. Emlyn’s.

There will be a load of well written post-SMACC articles out already. They’re written by people that write.

I am more of a talker. I spent the entire conference talking to people behind the scenes, in front of the scenes and causing the scenes.

As ever they are conversations in the fast lane and will be formed into LITFL JellyBeans

And what better way to start than two young women from St. Emlyn’s who applied for some of the volunteer scholarship type things that SMACC does. (This year there were 23 Volunteers and 3 Volunteer Co-ordinators.)

Meet Claire from Bolton and Saskia from Leeds. This was no War of the Roses. They were hard working and hard worked. They talk us through how they got involved and what sort of stuff they were doing.

The SMACC Junior volunteers are an interesting bunch. #FOAMed is about education and while SMACC has grown into its own very big and very successful thing the idea of free open access to medical education is still at the core of the endeavor. Thus it will always be about learning. I, for one, will always need to learn just to keep up with the guys that have barely started. These are those guys. There is something exciting about the early days of our various paths. Are you still feeling that?

One might think that the inspiration comes from the stage at events like SMACC or EM Essentials. I think there is inspiration in the young paramedics and EMTs, the students nurses and trainee midwives, the medical students and junior doctors. I know I feel it.

It’s not all about lights and cameras. The action is everywhere.

There will always be a need for #FOAMed or its equivalent. If you’ve learned something from #FOAMed then share it. It is much more than a blog, a podcast or an event.

If you have long since qualified then do you remember what it was like when, as a student, some one took an interest in you and taught you something? I hope you do. Be that person. Reach out to the students you meet and treat them with respect, share your hard earned knowledge with them, inspire them a bit. That inspiration works both ways.

We are all students. We all need teachers. We all can teach. You don’t have to be on the stage or on the web.

Bedside” teaching/learning is an essential part of the nursing/paramedic/medicine experience. It’s good for the learner. It’s good for the teacher. Shake off a little cynicism and go out there and inspire and be inspired. It is a “win win”.

Volunteer. Put yourself forward. Reach out. Encourage. Nurture. Throw off your shackles and go be a relative “expert”. Help teach a student. It’s not as hard as you think. It is as inspirational now as it ever was. Have a listen and see if you don’t get a little bit infected.

Tune in next week for a very different story; learning medicine under siege in Aleppo.


jellybean podcast

Doug Lynch and a sprinkling of Matt Mac Partlin

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Dr Doug Lynch MA MBBS MPHTM. Critical Carer. Pathological Polymath. Medical Journeyman. Idealist. Feminist. Father. Friend. Melbourne | @TheTopEnd | JellyBeans | Enquiring Minds |

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