"I Hear and I Forget, I See and I Remember, I do and I Understand." Learning with Dr. Salil Bendre, a renowned Pulmonologist practising at Nanavati and KLS Memorial Hospital, has been an extraordinary experience! The pandemic has hit the medical education system because of which our clinical skills development has suffered a lot.
Thanks to this initiative of Switch India I actually came in patient contact after almost an entire year! Sir is not only an exceptional clinician but also a passionate teacher. His clinical knowledge and knack for teaching are truly commendable.
He taught us Respiratory Medicine right from the basics-starting with the Anatomy and Physiology of the system and helped strengthen our basic concepts. He managed to teach us about the pathology of the diseases along with their management from the clinical aspects.
We were fortunate to be able to witness sir perform a Bronchoscopy for an 80 year old woman who presented with an intractable cough of an unknown etiology.
Sir told us about the importance of observing every small detail in a patient as that could give us a clue about the diagnosis and the management. He made us auscultate almost every patient that came in the OPDs so that we understood the difference between the different breath sounds and thus the pathology behind it.
A highlight of the observership was donning a PPE kit and having Doctor written in front of my name on the same! Never had I thought that I'd get the opportunity to "suit up" and go to the COVID ICUs and Wards.
Sir was ready to teach us everything we wanted to learn and took us to the ICU to show us the different types of ventilation systems available to the COVID patients. Being actively involved in the care of COVID patients sir kept updating us about the drugs and vaccines and microbiology for the same.
Apart from academics, sir spoke to us about Mythology and how those lessons should be applied by us in our life and practice. Being a magician he awed us with some of his magic tricks!
Sir truly is an inspiration! Everything he taught us and spoke to us about was thought provoking and enlightening. This has been a wonderful learning experience for me and I can't wait to be part of more such clinical rotations!!
