19 Feb 2018

“In emergency medicine, there are some things you can treat and within an hour see the patient’s condition improve. If someone has been in lots of pain due to a dislocated ankle, you can help them quite quickly. If someone’s heart is going very fast or if their blood pressure is very low, you can sometimes relieve their condition there and then. That’s one of the most rewarding things about being a doctor,” says Sophie Mitchinson.

As one of the clinicians seconded to our remodelled Physician Response Unit, Sophie is treating patients with similar issues in their community every day:

“What I love about the PRU is that we can take the Emergency Department to the patient’s home and treat them in their environment. This is significant especially for elderly patients, who can find it hard to get out of their house and queue in the hospital.”

When asked about the nicest thing she has ever been told by someone she’d treated, Sophie says: “I like when people say I’ve been very kind, approachable or made them understand something they couldn’t understand before.”

“On the PRU, we treat on average 5-8 patients a day. We are giving these patients 1-2-1 care, our whole undivided attention. This is quite rare. In an Emergency Department, we would manage multiple patients at any one time.”

Is there anything Sophie wishes someone told her before she embarked on this career path? “I’ve wanted to be a doctor ever since I was seven years old. I’ve never wanted to be anything else. But I do wish someone had told me that I’d still be doing exams at the age of 33,” she laughs.

Find out more about the first 111 days of our remodelled PRU