In 2009 we made a film called ‘Donated to Science’, it told
the story of a group of medical students and the cadavers they dissected, it
gave a surprisingly intimate, heartwarming and even occasionally funny insight
in to the journey followed by people who donate their bodies to the medical
school for dissection, and the effect it has on them, their families and the
students who dissect them.
“excellent and
moving” NZ Listener
“extraordinarily
profound”Jane Bowron, Dominion Post
We were so taken with
the students in the film; their honesty, their openness and their humanity that
we decided to continue to follow them until they became doctors.
The students spend
the second half of their time at medical school attached to wards, clinics and
general practices around the country.There they learn the clinical and professional skills they need to
become good and safe doctors.
But that’s not all
that happens.They see and experience
things every day that the rest of us never see, or only see once in a lifetime,
things that enable them to grow as people, and as professionals.
We see their first
faltering steps as they learn the basic skills they need to examine a patient…
how to use a stethoscope, how to feel the tummy, and how to take blood. We’ll
see them struggle with boundaries and personal space as they meet their first
real patients.
As they master those
basic skills they gradually begin to find their place as part of the medical
team… and a whole new set of challenges arise… how to interact with other staff
in the hospital, how to cope with grumpy and demanding specialists and
desperately ill patients, how to cram 12 hours of work into an 8 hour day and
still have time to study for exams.
We’ll follow them
into the Operating Theatre, the Emergency Department and the Delivery Suite as
they experience the wonder of surgery, the drama of major trauma and the joys
(and stresses) of childbirth. We’ll go out with them to experience medicine at
its most intimate and personal in General Practice and in the Hospice.
It’s a long journey,
but it’s an amazing journey as every one of the students has their own mountain
to climb or river to cross as they grow into the role of doctors and move from
simply practising medicine to actually Practising Medicine.