Dear Senior Cycle 1 students
Welcome to RCSI Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology clinical rotation, where you will complete a six-week clerkship in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. This clinical attachment is structured as a labour ward week, neonatal paediatrics week, and four one-week attachments with clinical management teams. The final week will include an end of course assessment in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the form of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) and an assessment in Neonatology.
During your time here you will be integrated into the hospital clinical management teams. This means that you will function as full members of a healthcare management team in which you will have personal responsibility for helping admit and manage patients on the wards, as well as in the outpatient setting. You will function under the immediate supervision of Senior House Officers (SHOs) and Registrars, together with considerable exposure to Consultant management. Your duties will include writing admission histories and physical examinations, ward management work, conducting deliveries and assisting in surgery in theatre.
Additionally, spread throughout each week will be a number of fixed tutorials / lectures for the entire class. These sessions will include a certain amount of didactic teaching by faculty members, but will also require considerable individual student input in preparing topics or cases for discussion. Tutorials are used to facilitate learning around a particular topic; all students are expected to participate in each tutorial, either as the presenting student who will collate clinical and additional teaching material, or as the participating students who will need to read up on the topic and be prepared to interact appropriately with the student group. Students are expected to attend all of these fixed class tutorials, except when covering the labour ward or when at an off-site hospital.
Professional behaviour is expected at all times. This includes courteous interactions with patients and all hospital staff, and professional physical appearance (wear a clean white coat and stethoscope at all times, except when in the NICU, and ensure that your identity badge is visible at all times). Hospital scrubs are not to be worn outside of the Labour Ward or the Operating Theatre. Parking facilities are not available for students within hospital grounds.
Attendance at all components of your clinical attachment is required. Failure of attendance, or unsatisfactory performance, is grounds for being disbarred from taking the end-of-attachment examination. You may then be unable to sit the final examinations at the end of the year. Continuous assessment will be obtained on a weekly basis from the individual hospital teams that you are members of, with emphasis being placed on attendance, professional behaviour, and ability to function within a healthcare team.
The RCSI teams in the Rotunda Hospital Dublin, Coombe Women’s Hospital, National Maternity Hospital and Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda are committed to helping you get the most out of this clinical attachment, introducing you to this remarkable specialty, and preparing you for the final examinations in this subject.
The Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology makes full use of the RCSI Moodle intranet backbone to communicate, disseminate knowledge and support student assessment. You are encouraged to log onto this secure site with your RCSI password to take full advantage of its educational and informational resources.
Click here to go directly to the RCSI Moodle site: http://vle.rcsi.ie/login/index.php
Recommended Reading List - 
| Sample Student Tutorial Schedule -
Instructions for 2006 2007 OBGYN Clinical Attachment -
