NHS Frenchay Hospital 12/06/12

On the second day I spent the day in the trauma clinic of Frenchay Hospital, shadowing one of the physiotherapists from the hand centre. This was really interesting as I was able to grasp more of an understanding of how the X-rays work, and that they make a correct diagnosis much easier. This is because it uses invisible electromagnetic energy beams to produce images of internal tissues, bones, and organs onto film, so the injury is accurately shown.

For example, in the trauma clinic the most common injury was dislocation of the bones and fractures, which I can now easily identify from a patient's X-ray. The treatments however always varied slightly due to the different severity of the injury. For example, a full dislocation, which occurs when extreme force is put on a ligament, allowing the ends of two connected bones to separate, will take a longer time to heal and possibly need a longer period of physiotherapy. Also nerves take up to 12 weeks to completely repair. Therefore, if any nerves are damaged in a particular injury then physiotherapy is likely to last up to 12 weeks. I spent the morning from 9am-12:30pm in one particular area of the trauma clinic (section 3), and then in the afternoon from 1pm-4pm I was able to wander around more and watch bits of almost every case that came into the trauma clinic.

It was amazing to see the variety of different types of injuries. For example, It was fascinating to see the progress from X-rays and pictures of before and after physiotherapy on a woman with a crocodile bite on her little finger. Another patient also had a pen lid stuck in his hand. I was incredibly lucky to be able to watch this being removed from the patient's hand, which was an amazingly interesting experience. They started by injecting an anaesthetic into the injured hand and then iodine was applied to the area the doctor needed to cut into. I then observed the procedure to get the pen lid out of the hand which was pretty horrific but I had never seen anything like that in my life and so I found it intriguing.