Internship Placement

So my internship placement is at Maitland Cottage Children’s Orthopaedic Hospital. Maitland Cottage is a children’s hospital that specializes in the branch of medicine dealing with the correction of deformities of bones or muscles. They are also the only children’s orthopaedic hospital in the southernmost part of South Africa so most of the patients that come to the hospital are typically not from Cape Town but other parts of South Africa. Some even come as far as Johannesburg which is about a 13 hour car ride; so pretty far to get a great treatment plan. 

Also at Maitland Cottage is their renowned Club Foot Clinics that are held on Friday mornings from 08:00-10:00/11:00 depending on how many children come in that day. Club Foot is where the foot appears twisted and can even look as if it's upside down. Despite appearances, clubfoot itself doesn't cause any discomfort or pain. Treatment is composed of stretching, casting, and placing the foot (feet) in boots and for the most part is usually successful. If and only if after stretching and casting does not work does surgery become a viable option. The surgeons that I work with like to exhaust all forms of treatment before considering surgery because they [the surgeons] don’t like leaving children bed ridden for weeks on end. So if there is a way to avoid bed rest, they’ll take that route before taking to surgery. 

My role or position at the hospital is composed of three parts. One, sitting in on and observing theater (surgery), shadowing the physiotherapist (a version of physical therapy), and helping out in the Club Foot Clinic. I’ve spent a majority of my internship watching surgeries. I wish I could have spent more time working with the physiotherapist when she’s booked with her own set of interns and students, it’s easy to understand that she doesn’t have as much time to teach my coworker and I. Since I didn’t spend much time in physiotherapy, during the weeks that I was not watching surgery, I would hangout in the boys and girls ward getting to know some of the patients that I’d seen surgeries performed on. If I had seen a child’s surgery, I enjoyed being able to explain what they did to them [the kids] while they were being operated on --only the ones that would ask-- and I enjoyed that because it made me think differently on how to explain things to others, especially kids who can’t always understand the medical terminology. It also kept me accountable to paying attention when I was in the theater room. 

For anyone thinking of entering the medical field, (not specific towards pre-med students but nursing and others as well) I would highly consider coming to Cape Town to intern at Maitland Cottage. Since its proximity to the University of Cape Town (UCT) is so near, we get many UCT students who pass through doing their own internships or volunteering for their schooling. And since Maitland Cottage is used to having students around, the doctors and nurses are always willing to talk, teach, and explain anything to you if you aren’t sure about what is going on, which I always appreciated. It felt daunting at times ask questions because it sometimes does feel like there are such things as dumb questions but I found that if I wanted to actually learn and get something out of my internship, I needed to have the courage to ask questions if they arose.