Bachelor of Medical Science and Doctor of Medicine (MD) Scholarly Intensive Placement

All Monash medical students complete a six-week Scholarly Intensive Placement (also known as a SIP) during the final year of their MD program. Scholarly Intensive Placements allow you to focus on a particular medical or professional practice issue, in-depth, by taking part in scholarly activities, such as analysing relevant literature, collecting data, reviewing policies, or developing new resources. Jack Francis talks about his experiences during his Scholarly Intensive Placement (SIP).

“My Scholarly Intensive Placement (SIP) involved working with the Bendigo Health quality improvement department on a project to explore usage of the TrakCare EPR application by junior medical staff as their electronic medical record system and to manage their task worklist or non-urgent jobs. The project sought to find out whether there were any differences in how ward rounds were conducted between teams that were utilising this task worklist function and those that weren’t.

I was given the opportunity to discuss the project recommendations with the hospital’s clinical directors at their monthly meeting.

I am hopeful that the findings will refine the task worklist function amongst other teams at the hospital, allowing for improved uptake and engagement with this functionality of TrakCare EPR. The long term aim of this project is to hopefully replace the need for non-urgent tasks to be requested via phone calls, reducing interruptions for junior medical staff and improving the efficiency of ward round processes and other medical duties.

A highlight of the project was seeing the way that the hospital takes on the information and recommendations made by myself and my supervisors and seeing the potential difference that this work can bring. I think there’s a bit of a perception about SIP projects being a ‘tick-box’ exercise in final year medicine, simply done because it’s been made a requirement of the degree, so it was nice to see that the work that I had done was actually being considered toward some greater end than my own education.

Having performed a bit of research in the past (nothing published mind you), the SIP project felt very familiar to me. The team I was working with, Ryan Pomado and Shona Critch, were very supportive and enthusiastic in having me on board, and they made every effort to make sure that I had what I needed. You are afforded a great deal of independence when it comes to this kind of work, but by no means does that mean you can’t ask for help. Ryan and Shona were fantastic in hearing out my questions and concerns, as well as providing me with some direction when I wasn’t quite sure what to do next. There was a lot of work involved in the project, but I enjoyed it for the fact that I was working with an incredibly supportive team.

To any other students who may have to do a SIP in the course of their studies or are considering doing a SIP, I’d say go for it. If nothing else, it’ll give you some real world experience of how projects are conducted in the hospital environment, and you’ll gain skills and confidence that you can apply to research projects. I think a growth mindset is empowering especially considering the degree to which research forms part of our medical acumen and is a boon for anyone looking to specialise into particular fields within medicine.”

Find out more about Scholarly Intensive Placements