SMSUK x MMI UK x HKMSUK Medical Careers Conference - At the Crossroads: Charting your path to the right specialty

London, United Kingdom, 9th November 2019 - At the Crossroads is the fifth installation of MMI United Kingdom’s annual medical conference in collaboration with SMSUK, joined by HKMSUK for this year’s event. This conference serves the purpose of providing our members with the necessary skills and knowledge for them to make informed decisions with regards to their future career choices - especially for international students like us, information about the differences between practicing at home in Malaysia or in the UK would be essential and helpful as well.

To start off the event we had a few keynote talks from our honourable speakers. We had Prof. Alan Fenwick OBE talking about the “Impact of Collaboration on the Quality of Life of Children in Africa”, followed by Dr Daniel Ting talking about the use of AI in ophthalmology - who is the current Associate Professor in Ophthalmology with Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Next we had 2 talks from Dr Calver Pang who is currently a Clinical research Fellow at Royal Free London and Dr Lawrence Nip, an FY2 in Manchester who both gave us an outlook on the different pathways you can pursue after your years as a foundation doctor - through the academic pathway or core training pathway. 

Following the keynote speeches, we had our panel titled “Where to Work and Why” joined by 4 speakers who have had experience in the medical field in different countries - Malaysia, United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Singapore. This was an interactive session where the audience would be able to send in questions to the speakers - and most was revolved around the different healthcare systems and medical practices back home, how working life in the other countries differs from the UK. It was an interesting session with the panelists sharing their thoughts on why they chose to reside in where they are practicing or going to practice in, which falls a lot on to personal preferences, family and training opportunities available. 

As the keynote speeches and panels ended, we headed to lunch and alongside that the poster presentations took place. After that it was the workshops. There were 5 different workshops carried out at the same time, each lasting an hour. Our workshops consisted of talks on training pathways - medical, surgical and academic alongside talks on certain specialties like internal medicine and paediatrics, last but not least is the practical and interactive workshops which were made up of suturing, O&G, A&E and CV workshops. These workshops have always received good feedback on the wide variety of choices available to our participants and the wide range of topics covered by them.

The event would not have been possible without the help of our sponsors from AMBOSS, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Doctors Academy, Osmosis - and with special thanks to the UCL Surgical Society. This event is the centrepiece of our work to provide our members a safe and professional platform to connect with like-minded colleagues and to build a broad network for their future careers.

Written by,
Tan Wei Wen
President
MMI United Kingdom 19/20