Merry Christmas from twitfrg!

I hope everyone enjoys their Christmas break (if you all get one!) and twitfrg will restart with notes being posted on 7th Jan, and discussion on 10th Jan.

If you would like to write revision notes or get involved next year, please get in touch! And if you've used our revision notes this year, please take 2 minutes to fill in this quick survey to tell us what you think so we can improve them!

Survey link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/M73NY95


Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The twitfrg team

Revision notes

I've created a survey so we can get some feedback on what everyone thinks about the revision notes. Please take part and let us know your thoughts. The survey can be found here in the sidebar to the right of this post.

Guidelines for Writing Revision Notes

• Submit all notes by email to twitfrg@gmail.com
• Deadline is 5pm on the SUNDAY BEFORE the discussion week (e.g. W/C 17th Dec, Submission would be by 5pm on 16th Dec)
• Notes must be written in Microsoft Word, size 12 Arial font, no more than 2 A4 pages of text
• Please focus on either a general overview of the topic or a particular aspect (e.g. Diagnosis and management of obstetric cholestasis when the topic is "The approach to the itchy pregnant patient") [and please let me know which of these you are doing!]
• Please appropriately reference your work as necessary (Harvard or Vancouver referencing)
• Please make sure any images used are referenced properly
• Please let me know how you would like to be referenced when I put your notes on the blog (e.g. Faye Bishton, Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia; or Faye, @twitfrg, Final Year Medical Student)
• Use whatever formatting you prefer (provided it is readable!) - tables, images, mind maps, or whatever else. The more variety, the better!

This week's case: LOC

Hi all - Thom here.

I'll be leading this week's case discussion on loss of consciousness (from the @twitfrg account). I thought I'd just outline the structure I'm planning to follow so we can get the most out of the discussion. This week's notes cover the basics of initial assessment. I've kept them brief as there are so many routes to go down, but figured you can look things up as appropriate for areas where you feel you need to. For the case, you may want to look at management of seizures. Maybe.

DOCTORS - I will ask for your input at appropriate points so you can contribute too, should you wish to!

And remember, ANYONE is welcome to join in!

LOC case

1. Presenting complaint and initial assessment - tweet what you would do first to stabilise patient
2. History & other clues
3. Causes of this episode
4. Examination
5. Impression and investigations
6. Clinical decision making - I'll tweet questions for consideration
7. SJT-style questions - I thought we could end with a couple of ethical questions in an SJT style if we get time (and if I can think of some!)

Ch ch changes!

Following a few discussions on twitter, it seems that by defining a topic each week, and basing the case on that, we're missing a really vital learning point - how to work out what the diagnosis is, based purely on presentation. After all, patients won't tell you they're an endocrine patient, and neither will you get told this in finals!

So, from next week (19th November onwards), instead of being "neurology" or "trauma" weeks, the weeks' topics will become "An approach to the patient with...."to try and help us all think outside specific systems, and learn the presentations of a variety of conditions. Fingers crossed this is another step to improving twitfrg!

W/C 29th October 2012 - Renal Medicine

Renal Medicine #twitfrg transcript:

http://storify.com/twitfrg/01-11-2012-renal-medicine

Case study, investigations and management coming soon....

W/C 22nd October 2012 Haematology Revision Notes

Apologies for the delay. Notes are for the discussion tomorrow at 8pm. Please join in and don't forget to use the hashtag (#twitfrg).

PDF Haematology Notes

Word Haematology Notes

You don't have to read the notes to join in the discussion, so please spread the word about it!

W/C 15th October 2012 #twitfrg Transcript

Storify link for the transcript of the discussion (if you have a protected account, your tweets probably won't show up - sorry!)

http://storify.com/twitfrg/18-10-2012-rheumatology

Schedule for Revision Notes

Here's the list of topics we're going to cover over the next few weeks. If you want to help write notes for us or want to suggest other topics, please get in touch via twitter or email (see the Contact Us page).

W/C 22nd October       Haematology
W/C 29th October        Renal medicine
W/C 5th November      Endocrinology
W/C 12th November    Obstetrics & Gynaecology
W/C 19th November    Neurology
W/C 26th November    Acute Medicine (Life on the wards, ward emergencies)
W/C 3rd December      General Surgery
W/C 10th December    Trauma & Orthopaedics

W/C 15th October 2012 Rheumatology Revision Notes

Discussion will be THURSDAY 18th October 2012, EIGHT PM.

• Word DMARDs Notes
• PDF DMARDs Notes
• Word Rheumatology Notes
• PDF Rheumatology Notes

The DMARD notes have been provided by a Rheumatology Registrar who has an interest in student teaching. They're really fantastic notes so I hope as many people will use them as possible for the discussion.

The idea this week is to structure the discussion on the night (either with questions or discussion points - please let us know which you'd prefer). This is in the hope that more people join in as you don't have to prepare anything for the night. Please get as many people involved as possible - you don't have to be sitting medical school finals to join in. Everyone is welcome.


The twitfrg team

W/C 8th October 2012 MCQ Answers

1.    C - Don't ever let a depressed patient leave without first having assessed their suicide risk. Also, for mild - moderate depression, computerised CBT is first line treatment according to the NICE Guidelines.

2.    H - a short history of sob and wheeze in a young child should make you think of an inhaled foreign body. This cannot always be seen on X-ray, however you can sometimes see associated collapse.

3.    D - lack of wheeze (silent chest) is worrying sign in asthma. It is important to learn the difference between different severities of acute asthma. In life threatening asthma as well as initiating treatment for acute asthma it is also vital to get anaesthetics involved as early as possible.

4.    F - most often in children under 2yrs and caused by the virus RSV. Treatment is supportive. Antibiotics are only useful if superimposed bacterial infection is suspected.

5.    D - minor trauma, fever and a red, hot swollen joint all point towards septic arthritis.

6.    F - perthes disease, 4:1 ratio of boys to girls. Most often occurs between 4-8yrs. Symptoms of limp and pain in the hip/groin (sometimes referred to the knee) come on gradually. This is caused by the femoral head losing some of it's blood supply causing some of the bone cells to die.

7.    F - Menorrhagia + low Hb + low MCV should make you think of iron deficiency anaemia

8.    J - Sweating, weight loss and diarrhoea, and a low TSH should make you thing of hyperthyroidism. Over production of thyroid hormones, leads to the negative feedback system releasing a low amount of thyroid stimulating hormone.

9.    H - Classical history for polycythaemia

10. D - No known HLA association with Type II Diabetes

W/C 8th October 2012 General Practice Revision Notes

The links to the revision documents are below:

Word document
PDF document
Enlarged Mindmap PDF

Have a look, read the notes, have a go at the questions and get ready for discussion at 7pm (GMT) on Thursday (11th October). Any questions, let us know!

Exciting Update!

PasTest have very kindly offered to provide questions for the revision document, as well as material from their books. This is a fantastic opportunity for us, and give you FREE access to their resources. A massive thank you goes to Hannah who has organised everything for me and agreed to help out so swiftly. I hope that you'll all appreciate how awesome this is and make use of twitfrg even more because of it.

9th October 2012

On Tuesday (9/10/12), we will post up the first set of revision notes and questions for discussion on Thursday 11th October at 7pm (GMT). For our first week, we've chosen general practice as the area for revision. The notes will contain a list of key examinations you should think about revising, key conditions you should have a knowledge of as well as more detailed notes on some of the most common presentations and conditions you would see in a general practice setting as well as ones that we're likely to be expected to know for finals. The revision notes will also have a set of revision questions at the end for you to have a go at ready for Thursday's discussion. The document will be available on this blog by 10pm on Tuesday and should hopefully be available for you to download in a variety of formats (at least a Microsoft Word file and PDF).

On Thursday, we'll kick the discussion off on twitter (using the hashtag #twitfrg for all tweets) and go through the questions one by one, with people giving their reasoning behind their answers, followed by us @twitfrg giving the "correct" answer and our reasoning for it. We'll then hopefully have a discussion of any points people wanted to raise about the notes/topics/questions and take suggestions for the following week's topics.

The days we release the document and have the discussion are temporary at the moment - if they suit most people then we'll keep them, or if everyone votes otherwise, we'll change them to suit people better.

If you would like to contribute questions or revision notes for this week or future weeks, or would like to help out with proofreading or building us a proper website (or help in any other way you can think of!) please get in touch via our email address: twitfrg@gmail.com or tweet us @twitfrg.

Please Vote!

A poll has been added to the right hand side of this blog - please vote for what night you'd like the live twitter discussion of the MCQs and revision resources! Sunday isn't an option so that we don't clash with the Twitter Journal Club.

VOTE HERE!!! --------->

How It Works

The idea for this group is that a topic/area of study for revision will be decided (ideally by voting, but initially most likely by the admins). A revision document will then be posted on the blog with a few relevant MCQs for you to try 2- 3 days before the desginated date and time for discussion. When it reaches discussion time, we'll log on to twitter and get the discussion going with all tweets marked with the #twitfrg hashtag. Everyone is welcome to join in, and there's no such thing as a stupid question! We hope that by releasing the revision document early, it gives everyone time to do a bit of their own revision and the questions so that everyone gets as much out of the discussion as possible. We'll discuss the answers to the MCQs and how we arrived at them, and also try and answer queries as we go along. We'll then post a transcript of the discussion on the blog afterwards (as soon as I work out how to do that). Fingers crossed this will be a valauble revision tool for all involved!