Graduating into a world wrestling with a tyrannical virus isn’t easy, and even less so for Beverley, Harish and Fadzil, three young doctors from the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine’s Class of 2020.

All three are Medical Officers and have been posted to different hospitals across Singapore. Beverley is with Tan Tock Seng Hospital in the department of renal medicine but is currently working in the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) to help see COVID-19 patients. Fadzil was posted to the cardiology department at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital and Harish is a month into his second posting at the Institute of Mental Health after spending four months at Changi General Hospital’s A&E department.

For Beverley and Fadzil, there’s no such thing as a fixed daily schedule. In the NCID, Beverley has to be ready for any sudden influx of COVID-19 patients or situations where her patients take a turn for the worse.

“The one thing I know for certain about my day is that I wake up at 5.45am every morning,” she laughs.

“Generally, mornings are the busiest as I need to look through patient case notes and find out if anything significant happened overnight. Then I do my rounds and act on any changes in treatment plans. On better days, we can go for a coffee break after that!”

Fadzil’s day similarly involves doing his rounds and writing up case reports, but in the cardiology department, an emergency could mean a life-or-death situation, where he could see his day’s plans change in a literal heartbeat.

“One of the most rewarding moments for me is seeing my patients get nursed back to the pink of health and leave the hospital better than when they first came in,” says Fadzil.

“I realised the importance of communicating in a manner where patients trust you. That was something I learnt in NTU through interacting with simulated patients. I can see now that it makes a big difference in whether your patients recover quickly or not,” he adds.

Beverley, too, credits the team-based learning system in NTU for helping her to adapt to the medical profession: “Solving class problems as a group closely mimics what doctors have to do daily. At work, we constantly interact with different teams and people depending on what is going on with our patients, so learning how to manage team relations as a student was invaluable.”

Over at the Institute of Mental Health, Harish’s day is a little more mellow. There, he works in the early psychosis intervention programme where he sees patients as young as 18 who are newly diagnosed with mental health issues. Together with other doctors, they evaluate and treat these patients as well as coordinate their long-term care.

“My time in NTU gave me a stable foundation on which to grow as a junior doctor. It gave me the flexibility to explore the areas of medicine I’m interested in, such as psychiatry, which I was already keen on during my fourth year at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine,” says Harish.

This story was published in the Oct-Dec 2021 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.