BDS Clinical Postings: A Survival Guide

In short: Two students in the same posting can finish with very different experience, and the difference is behaviour: arrive early, volunteer for the difficult cases, carry your own instruments, log every case with what you would do differently, say "let me check with sir" instead of guessing — and report mistakes immediately.

Lectures are the same for everyone. Clinical postings are not — two students in the same department for the same months can finish with wildly different experience, and the difference is mostly behaviour.

Be the one who is present

The students who get taught are the ones who are visibly there and visibly willing. Arrive before you need to, stay when something interesting is happening, and volunteer for the case nobody wants. The awkward extraction teaches you more than three straightforward ones.

Postgraduates and staff notice who helps. Being the student who is already holding the suction gets you invited to the next case.

Carry your own kit

Borrowing costs you time and goodwill. Have your own mouth mirror, probe, tweezers and pen, plus a notebook that lives in your pocket. Write down what you saw and what you did on the day — not at the end of the week when it has blurred.

Your first patients

• Introduce yourself as a student. Honestly and without apologising for it. Most patients are fine with it.
• Take a proper history before touching anything. It is the part most students rush and the part that most often contains the answer.
• Explain before you do. Even for something small.
• Ask when you do not know. Every single time. "I am not sure, let me check with sir" is a correct and professional answer. Guessing on a patient is not.
• Do not overcommit. Promising something you cannot deliver damages the patient's trust in the department, not just in you.

Log cases properly

Your logbook is a requirement, but treated well it is also the only record of what you can actually do. Record what the case was, what you did versus what you observed, what went wrong, and what you would do differently. That last field is the one that turns a logbook into learning.

Photograph interesting cases where your institution permits it and the patient consents. Anonymised, they become your case presentations, your viva examples and later your portfolio — see case presentation guide.

When something goes wrong

It will. A tooth fractures, you cannot get anaesthesia to work, a patient becomes distressed.

Tell someone immediately. Do not try to fix it alone, and do not hide it. Every clinician has a list of things that went wrong early on — the ones who became good are the ones who reported them and learned. The ones who hid them repeated them.

Getting more out of it than the timetable allows

Follow cases across departments rather than seeing isolated procedures. Ask to see the same patient at review. Watch a full treatment sequence from diagnosis to completion — that is what you will be doing in practice and it is exactly what postings fragment.

On EnamDoc, students can follow a practising dentist's real, de-identified cases from diagnosis through to outcome — see EnamDoc for students.