Day in the life - Neurosurgeon on call

so it's about 5:30 in the morning I've just left home to start my nearest surgery on-call shift overall London Hospital and it's a 24-hour shift we're going to start with handover at 8:00 a.m. and then we're going to go all the way through to tomorrow morning so I'm going to take you on my journey now and take you through the rest of the day and hope you enjoy this day in the life of a neurosurgeon on call this is the problem with sleepy saturdays at sleepy little stations no coffee so the only good thing about leaving so early to get to work is that you get a completely empty train carriage to yourself usually I spend this time commuting to edit brain book videos on my laptop or try and write some publications and so on and so forth try and catch up with some admin and emails but some of you may have seen on Instagram recently that my video editing laptop got smashed to pieces so this morning I'm just gonna get my Kindle out and relax and read a book for once just heading to Whitechapel station on the Underground to start work and I've had the most important part of the day which is my first double espresso nice thing about Saturday's is the tubers an absolutely round it's usually a complete rat race down here so we're in the neurosurgical on-call room give you a quick guided tour so we have God's bathroom shower toilet etc and the obligatory bed the bed doesn't see a lot of use although some lights are a bit I'm not going to say the q''-word slower than others and we've got one computer with two screens so we can have a referral up on one screen and then we can have the scans up on another makes it a bit quicker and this is probably one of the only working computers that we can access that's fast so I'm just gonna get changed into scrubs now and then go and start the ward round with us and the SHA that you met earlier and there's quite a few patients to see okay so I'm in scrubs ready to go got ID cards DECT phone dis little hot potato is horrendous this can make or break your own call can be relentless and go off constantly I'm hoping that it will stay slow but it's the beginning of the day doctors and other hospitals and in this hospital are just gearing up again so I think the referrals will start to come in slow and steady throughout the day we've got two cases on the Emergency operating list that need to be done and we've got an emergency admission from overnight that I need to see again this morning with the SHA and see if they might need an operation as well when we're on call in the hospital there's usually a consultant on call from home who'll come on come in for things that I wouldn't be able to handle as a registrar and they're always on hand to give advice if you're stuck in a clinical Dino what to do and there's me registrar on call and there's also an SH o or senior house officer on call who would take care of the wall and also help the registrar in the accident in emergency department do procedures and sometimes do some operating as well with the Reg on-call supervising we're going to go and see all of the neurosurgery in patients do some troubleshooting make sure they're all well and then wait for referrals so we finished our ward round at about 11:30 maybe twelve o'clock this guy went and got lunch on his own because he's a loser and an I went and got lunch he was too hungry and we couldn't wait for me so as penance he's still doing a lot of Ward work essentially after the ward round it generates jobs that the senior house officer will do we don't have house officers or FY ones in neurosurgery not here in London anyway and he's going to get lots of calls from the wards we've got how many patients have we got as inpatients 52 inpatients so that can generate a lot of work over the course of the day the senior house officers do eight or eight shifts sometimes stay a lot later especially Hassan because he likes to stay and operate I've been taking referrals on our online referral system and take referrals from all over North and East London bars health NHS trusts is probably the largest trust in the United Kingdom if not Europe five hospitals and we have a catchment of 2.5 million people and more than that to take in trauma from other hospitals from West London as well so pretty high workload can get a lot of calls but thankfully this afternoon has been relatively slow but we've got some in patients that are getting sick and causing some major problems so we're trying to deal with that and we're going to go to the operating theatres shortly because the emergency operating theatre has just become free from an ear nose and throat emergency so we're going to take a patient to theatres and the consultants is coming in to help with that but is dr. Alessi to your doctor he's you know the best in this business trust me haha high praise high praise indeed shepley's the bees means she is she's the queen bee on the ward I am you are she's been begging to be on brain book for ages and here she is now she's acting all shy tummy shuffler is it difficult being a sister on 12e no no do we have patient information on the screen no we don't know what's the best part of working on 12 the other than spend time with me [Music] being on 12 is the best part I think it's the best ward in the hospital I've got no bias of its cause there's no bias there at all why would there be no of course not what well you've got 12 F 12 E outliers ITU and yes calling us a bit yeah of course right of course there's no bias there so once so what's your favorite part well V the whole of 12 minutes is it so what's the worst part by working with neurosurgeons they're lazy well how are we nosy so look why I have to put up with when you have to put up with we're not lazy man so tell me tell me okay so what's the best part about working with neurosurgeons they're all going off ship now and the night's nursing staff and hcas are coming in and look after the patient's overnight isn't that right and you're doing the rota for checking the staffing for tonight that's a perpetual problem in hospitals especially big major trauma centers like here staffing can sometimes be an issue but it's never unsafe so it's now about 10:40 and it's been a pretty busy day I've had a few admissions done a couple of emergency operations and what I'm gonna do now is just catch up with the emergency referrals to our online system and go and do a quick run around on the patients that I admitted during a day make sure they're still alright and catch up with the nurses looking after those patients too and I'm also go on to this that was an accident and emergency referral that I just took patients with back and leg pain that might be secondary to a intervertebral disc so that's one of the disks in the spine there might be compressing one of the nerves but looking at the scans it doesn't look like there's a role for a neurosurgeon to intervene so accident an emergency and admit that for pain management so I was about to show you something really cool which is the view from the neuro high dependency unit which is one of the most beautiful views of London that I think I've seen so it's nearly midnight now and we've got a new emergency case that we need to do we've been trying to get into the emergency theater but it looks like the general surgeons have picked us to it and with some horrible complex abdominal surgery that needs to be done I think they're going to send for our patient which means calling up to the ward to get the patient hopefully in about 45 minutes which means that we'll probably start operating at about 1:00 1:30 in the morning they'll probably be done by about 3 o'clock so I will keep you updated otherwise I'm still going through referrals on our online referral system still getting phone calls probably about four or five an hour with new referrals from accident and emergency departments across the trust and across north and east london and going to try and keep on top of things keep the system going and maybe even lie down for a minute let's see so the patient eventually got to your prating theatre at about two o'clock no 1:30 and had to stop everything because there was something called an advanced trauma call down in a knee recess which meant that everything had to stop there too had to stop in case the patient needed emergency neurosurgery intervention or for the general surgeons to do or former surgeons to operate as well and thank well the patient's not in a good way but doesn't need emergency surgery right now so they're happy for us to go ahead so we're going to start operating in a minute as predicted it's about 2:15 we're finally in the operating theater getting stuff ready to do our emergency case and just making sure patients ready to get on the operating table and after this probably try and wind down right so it's about 4:30 in the morning we've just finished operating and then the emergency department put out something called a code black call which is for a neurosurgical emergency and that's when a patient presents sometimes we're usually via the hem service with a drop in their conscious level and a blown pupil which means that there's a brain injury that's sufficiently bad that the brain has been compressed and they might need emergency neuro surgery we ended up starting the operation it's about 7:30 in the morning and it was a patient with an acute subdural hematoma that we evacuated through a craniotomy that time in the morning is quite difficult because we're preparing for handover at 8:00 in the morning where all of the day team has come in and get handover from the night sh o & registrar the day uncle reg came to the operating theatre and took handover from me and after I finished at about 10 o'clock in the morning I called the consultant on call and let the what was pending from the past 24 hours and if there were any patients coming over for emergency assessment or surgery after that get home go to bed for a couple of hours try and normalize then go to sleep at a normal time that evening and then get ready for my next on-call shift or normal shift the end of a 24 hour on call shifts that are all London hospital and I hope you enjoyed the trip and learnt a little bit along the way remember if you want to watch more videos like this don't forget to subscribe to us on YouTube see with the next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: Brainbook

Views: 2,664,543

Rating: 4.9053717 out of 5

Keywords: day in the life - neurosurgeon on call, day in the life of a neurosurgeon, day in the life neurosurgeon, neurosurgery, surgery, neurosurgeon, surgeon, brain surgery, hospital, residency, neurosurgery residency, brain, medicine, neurosurgery residency day in the life, neurosurgery uk, hospital vlog, medical student, resident, day in the life, life, medical, health, doctor vlog, junior doctor, day in the life of a doctor, doctor, medical school

Id: 8RXEaAjpt4Q

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019