The Community Placement is an innovative scheme requiring you to work with one of a range of health and social care agencies or charities on Teesside in order to gain an in-depth understanding of what they provide, how they work and the communities they serve. The Community Placement also gives you the opportunity to apply your developing communication and observation skills to a ‘real life' setting and to gain early experience of interprofessional and inter-agency working, which are increasingly important in medical practice. Here's what one student has had to say about his placement:
I’m doing a community placement near North Tees hospital… I go to patient’s houses and I talk to them about after-hospital care such as physiotherapy… I think medicine in the community, MiC and PPD strand is the most important thing... in this whole degree because I think you need to focus more on the social side of medicine more than anything else and to understand what a patient is going through is the most important thing in terms of how you can actually treat their illness. The first couple of visits on my community placement... I didn’t know what I was doing, but after the MiC component… I understood that it’s really, really important to become a really good doctor and now I’m really, really enjoying my community placement… having put MiC in practice… it’s more enjoyable putting something into practice rather than just reading about something from a piece of paper.
Kunal Patel, Stage 1
