Dr Jen Gillespie (1993)
Dr Jen Gillespie is paving the way through COVID-19 in her role as a full time Radiologist and Director of Training for Radiology at the RBWH. Having a special interest in Head and Neck Imaging and am a member of the Head and Neck multidisciplinary team (MDT) at the Royal, Jen is heavily involved in teaching and research into head and neck cancer. She regularly lectures at local, national and international conferences.
Normally, as a radiologist, Jen would be in a reporting room, next to her trainees, looking at the images with the registrar and talking about the case as they go. She would regularly have other doctors, including Oncologists or Surgeons, come down to the reporting room and ask for advice about the imaging of their patients.
The COVID-19 situation has significantly impacted their ability to train junior doctors and has required a shift in the way things are done. Now with social distancing, the radiologists are all seated in separate offices and have no face to face contact with their trainees. Jen and the team have started to embrace technology to overcome these challenges. Like most of us, Jen and the other Radiologists are using Microsoft Teams to share screens with other doctors. This allows Jen and her trainees to chat about the case and be able to scroll through the images to point to what we are seeing in real time. They are using this for day to day work but also doing tutorials with trainees in the same manner.
Previously, trainees who were offsite (in Townsville for example) were not able to attend these teaching sessions, but they are now able to join these tutorials virtually. It’s important in this situation to continue to train and support junior staff. It’s been great having everyone communicate with each other via online platforms. Jen has personally been chatting to more people than usual via FaceTime or Skype and reconnecting with old friends from school and university!
