An Outing with the injection bum!

Yes that has been my adventure this week – sad or what!  Skills London 2010 was a four day event in the Excel Centre in East London, designed to showcase opportunities for work, study and apprenticeships to students studying A Levels and GCSEs.  Greenwich University had a stand and I joined the team on Friday and Saturday.  My remit was to work on the skills table for the School of Health and Social Care.  Pride of place was held by the injection bum – a plastic model for students to practice giving injections in that part of the anatomy  more correctly known as the maximus gluteus muscle.  One cheek was intact while the other had a section cut away to show the nerves and blood vessels you could hit by injecting in the wrong place. 

We had some interesting comments from students:

‘Errr (poke poke) is it real?’ to which I replied ‘Yes, of course!  The rest of her is under the table!’

or ‘Nah – they wouldn’t let us chop up a real person so we had to do with this plastic one!’ 

We had boys turning the model over to check out her ‘bits’  and I did wonder how they expected to learn much about the birds and bees from that experience.

I was joined by four paramedic students on Saturday.  They were only four weeks into their course and hadn’t ‘done’ injections yet. They had great fun demonstrating and practising themselves.  Julie, the nursing tutor, had to demonstrate all the electronic temperature, blood pressure, pulse and oxygen saturation equipment to me because when I trained in the 1970’s it was all mercury thermometers, feeling pulses with my fingers and  counting the beats for 30 seconds timed on a hand held  watch and taking blood pressures with a mercury machine and a stethoscope.  Of course we also lived in caves and dressed in animal furs as well!

…anyway the event was very busy and we ran out of prospectuses having given out 1500  by early Friday.  We then took names and addresses to send them out later so you can imagine how busy we have been in despatch this week!

I arrived home on Saturday exhausted with little voice left after talking to so many people and competing with the events on the stage next to our stand.  However, I was incredibly impressed at how everyone mucked in together and worked so well as a team. 

The rest of the week has been a bit of an anticlimax!  Sunday was a day to relax and enjoy that gorgeous weather before rushing through all the preparation work and reading needed for college on Wednesday.