By Maya Shah and Annika Malhotra, Year 13

The NHEHS Medical Conference was held on Wednesday 29 September. We decided to organise the conference to provide an opportunity for aspiring medical students to gain further insights into a career in healthcare. We felt that whilst virtual work experience programmes put in place due to the pandemic have been useful, they have lacked the interactive, hands-on approach that an in-person placement provides. For this reason, we decided to run case study based sessions, centering the problem-solving style that many medical schools adopt. 

The speakers included:

• Dr Elora Mukherjee, an NHEHS parent and Consultant in Acute Medicine
• Miss Sukhpreet Gahunia, an NHEHS alumna and General Surgery Registrar
• Dr Sugharshini Murugesu, an NHEHS alumna and Obstetrics and Gynaecology Registrar
• Dr Pooja Dassan, an NHEHS alumna and Consultant Neurologist
• Miss Rinda Naresh, an NHEHS alumna currently studying Medicine at New College, Oxford.

We were really lucky to have such a great mix of specialties and are so grateful to all these speakers for giving their time to speak at the conference. We heard about life as a doctor and medical student during the pandemic, dealing with high profile murder cases, complex obstetrics cases, prioritisation of urgent cases, tips on applying to medical school and how to deal with multiple requests for medical advice from family and friends!

We wanted this conference to provide an opportunity to further develop links with local schools and, therefore, we invited Ellen Wilkinson School, Elthorne Park High School, Greenford High School, Twyford CofE High School, Dormers Wells High School and Cardinal Wiseman School, as well as other GDST schools.

We had a great turnout of over 70 students. 

We are very grateful to all the staff who helped us with the organisation and hosting of this conference.

These included Mrs Truman, who helped us with contacting alumnae and finding speakers, Mr Livings, who helped us invite local schools and, of course, Dr Sheldon, who has been instrumental in organising the conference and making everything run smoothly. Thank you also to Ms Henry for the catering, the IT technicians for helping with our computer-based needs, and all the caretakers for setting up everything we needed for the event.