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Kieran FitzGerald a contributor to the new Student Medical Journal

21 Oct 2020

With all the boredom of lockdown, I saw the new student medical journal was being started up and an email was sent to all students looking for submissions. On different placements, from multiple doctors, there was a strong message that research experience would be beneficial, if not required, for different applications or interviews. I am not usually one to care too much about the future, usually hoping things will work out while refusing to put in any real effort. But the monotony of lockdown was the main contributor to revisiting the torment of my literature review. Writing it earlier in the year was one of the worst experiences in college, writing most of the weekend before it was due, with very little guidance, or even idea of what a literature review was.

The students running the journal, especially Ciara O'Donoghue, were very helpful with drafting and breaking down exactly what was needed at each step, and it was good to hear the criticism. It's a great initiative by the MRT society to make journal experience more accessible, and the students doing peer reviewing and creating the journal, were of more help than many of the academic staff!
 
The paper, The Effects of Postoperative Delirium on Outcomes in Hip Fracture Patients, addresses a number of problems, hip fractures in an increasingly aged population, focusing specifically on the effect postoperative delirium can have. I chose the topic due adequate suitable recent papers to review, loosely based around my FYP which is an audit of the neck of femur fracture fast-track pathway of care in CUH. The topic of delirium arose due to inclusion of delirium screening as part of the fast-track pathway.
 
The Effects of Postoperative Delirium on Outcomes in Hip Fracture Patients can be found on page 30 of the Student Medical Journal

Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine

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