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Dylan's story

“I feel very lucky to be able to study Medicine here. For as long as I remember I have wanted to be a doctor.”

Dylan Mehew (U18)

“I instantly felt at home in Churchill and greatly appreciated the amount of students coming from similar backgrounds to myself.”

Dylan began volunteering in a care home whilst he was at school in Derbyshire and continued working there full-time during his gap year. He also returned to work there during the pandemic, when College had to send students home between March and October 2020. He is thankful that he had this rare opportunity to gain work experience - few Cambridge students are able to because they are not allowed to work. Not only will this experience help him to work better with patients, but he also has a full understanding of the importance of support staff.
Dylan is in his sixth and final year at Churchill, and since his fourth year he has himself been a supervisor to first year medics at Gonville and Caius.
“The supervision system was extremely helpful during my time as a pre-clinical student. Being in supervisions with many students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds to myself allowed me to get more out of the experience and not feel intimidated by the sessions.”

He feels that Churchill is very different to other Colleges: elsewhere there is often an intense level of competition between students. Dylan went to a state comprehensive school in Derbyshire and had never met someone from a grammar or private school before arriving in Cambridge. 
Dylan’s family are unable to help him financially as they too struggle to make ends meet, so during his first few years at university Dylan took part in Clinical Trials during the holidays to earn extra money. Unfortunately he is no longer eligible to take part in trials.
“This caused a great deal of worry over how I could finance the rest of the year, particularly in light of the current cost of living crisis. The money from this bursary helped me greatly by allowing me to get out of my overdraft and stop worrying about how I will afford next month's rent and bills.”

The majority of Cambridge students are able to spend their seven-week summer elective abroad, experiencing a different health care system. Dylan read elective reports written by students from the years above, and they raved about a hospital in Borneo, where the medical staff work in English. Though accommodation costs for the elective are covered by the NHS, students have to fund their own travel. Getting to Borneo involves around 24 hours of travel with flights via Abu Dhabi and Kuala Lumpur.
More than half of Cambridge students can just ask their parents for the money, another proportion can budget and save up for it, and a small proportion simply cannot afford it. This would have included Dylan if it was not for the Bursary he received from Churchill College.
“Most students undertake their elective in a foreign country but until being awarded the Bursary I had planned to stay in the UK as I was unable to afford the flights. I am extremely grateful for the funding that has allowed me to access an opportunity most other students are able to finance themselves or with financial help from their families: I will be able to have the student experience many others take for granted.”

Thanks to its generous donors, the College was able to offer Dylan the financial support he needed to travel to Borneo to observe and shadow doctors in an Accident and Emergency department where snake bites, scooter accidents and malaria were commonplace. Bursary support gave Dylan the opportunity to experience a less-developed country’s health care system and encounter tropical diseases that would be extremely rare here. Dylan has no doubt that this experience will help to make him a better doctor.

Now in his final year, Dylan lives in a College-owned house near Addenbrooke’s Hospital with a number of other Churchill medics. Addenbrooke’s is so vast and has so many students that it is easy to get lost in the crowd. Dylan has preferred the placements he has had at smaller hospitals in the surrounding area, like Bedford and Hinchingbrooke, where the staff are able to dedicate more time to the students and they can be given more responsibility. When he can’t roll out of bed and into the world-leading hospital on his doorstep, Dylan needs to drive to his placements, but without Bursary support, Dylan would have had no choice but to sell his car to pay his rent.
When he leaves Churchill in July, Dylan hopes to complete his two Foundation Years in the North-West region before becoming a GP. He is attracted to General Practice by the variety that comes with diagnosing all sorts of different conditions, the ability to strike a better work/life balance than is possible in other medical careers, and the opportunity to build a rapport with his patients. Music to Harry’s ears, another clinical medical student! (Read Harry’s story below.)

Harry's story

Harry Dunn (U19)

“There are several things I love about Churchill - it’s obviously a wonderful place to study, absolutely beautiful grounds, beautiful buildings, and a fabulous supportive team. But even more importantly than that, for me the most important thing about Churchill has just been the community of friends that I’ve built here during my time, that have really made my university experience more than I ever hoped it could have been.”

Harry grew up in Bury St Edmunds, and as an academically-minded student, Cambridge was always the University where he wanted to study because of its reputation as “the place to be”. In year 10, his secondary school attended a History conference at Churchill as part of an Outreach programme and he fell in love! Now in his fifth year at Churchill, the College’s supportive community has really suited him. Harry’s favourite memories are from Staircase 2 in North Court, and he is glad to be able to live back in College again because of the green spaces, the facilities, and the MCR.
Outside of his studies, he plays tennis, spends time with friends and does super-curricular things like research and debating. He captained Churchill’s tennis team in second year, leading them to victory in the University Cup.
Harry had planned to study physics but when he suffered a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) during his A-level studies he knew he wanted to become a doctor. The care that he received in hospital made him think how fantastic it would be to be able to provide that care to others. It was this first-hand experience of the impact that doctors and their care team can have and their ability to fix somebody in their time of crisis that inspired him to pursue a degree in medicine.
“It’s good to have a strong reason driving you into the career, especially when it is such a difficult career.”

Clinical medical students, those in their fifth and sixth year of study, face a big drop off in funding compared after their pre-clinical medicine years because they are no longer eligible for the same level of financial support provided by a full Government maintenance loan.
“Obviously we can’t work because we’re on placement a lot of the time, so lots of medical students struggle. Many of the medical students are really lucky in that College’s bursaries have allowed us to focus on learning how to be a doctor.”

It is thanks to the generosity of donors to the College that Churchill is able to support talented medical students like Harry to make sure that they are able to complete their studies and fulfil their potential.
Ultimately, Harry wants to combine clinical medicine, academia, policy and politics: this is where he feels he will be able to make the biggest difference on the widest scale. Management-trained clinicians are best placed to deliver the effective leadership needed to improve patient outcomes, but policymakers currently include very few clinically trained voices. Harry is keen to change this.

Last Spring, Harry spent his student-selected component working as a policy intern at the NHS Confederation, the membership organisation that brings together, supports and speaks for the whole healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. During this internship he published a blog on NHS Voices alongside leading medical experts: ‘Going over to the dark side’: creating a culture of clinical leadership in the NHS. 

Issues that most interest Harry include the funding and structure of the NHS, evidence-based health policy, and addressing health inequalities. Most UK residents are aware that there are not enough GPs in the NHS but are perhaps not aware that this problem is worse in areas where poverty and underinvestment in health and social care mean patients experience poorer health compared with wealthier regions. For example, disability-free life expectancy drops from 70 in Richmond upon Thames to 56 in deprived areas like Nottingham.

The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research, and over the last few months Harry has been working as part of a team at the NIHR carrying out a realist review into the Sustainable General Practitioner Workforce. The review looked at factors that will contribute to GPs wanting to continue practising: for example, doctors want to see the same patients, and patients who see the same doctor have better health outcomes, so what can be done to make that happen? Their review examined aspects of the NHS which support or challenge the sustainability of the GP workforce, aiming to offer recommendations to inform sustainable, context-specific ways of future working which will assist the GP workforce in delivering equitable and effective patient care.
Next time you are trying to make a doctors’ appointment, perhaps you can draw some comfort from the knowledge that Harry will soon be on his way to the forefront of NHS policy making!

Luisa's story

Luisa Fassi (G21)

“I think that funding, either when it comes from College, such as Churchill, as well as all other sources, can really make a whole lot of difference for doing research. Especially for early career researchers like me that are just beginning their academic career, having the adequate support is really crucial. First of all, it helps conducting research that is ethical and robust because with funding you can pay research participants, and access equipment and data. This, in turn, increases your confidence in the work that you are doing. Secondly, funding helps you lay the first step for the later stages of your career, by allowing you to travel, attend conferences and establishing a network.”

Luisa grew up close to the mountains in Albino, a small town in the north of Italy. Driven by her interest in Philosophy of Science, she left her home country at the age of eighteen, being the first of her family to live abroad, and moved to the Netherlands, where university education is cheaper than in England but classes are still in English. Luisa graduated with Honours from Erasmus University Rotterdam, scoring in the top 5% of her cohort. During her undergraduate degree, she specialised in molecular neuroscience and, for two years, conducted a part-time research internship studying the mechanisms underlying brain development in relation to mental illness. As part of this experience, she deepened her interest in the complexity of Mental Health. However, she also realised that she did not especially enjoy fundamental research, that involves experimenting on animals, and therefore decided to move into applied research. This brought her to apply to a Masters in Psychological Research at the University of Oxford, where she begun studying Cognitive Neuroscience and Statistics. After COVID-19 hit in 2020, she moved back to Italy where she worked for a year before she received funding support to conduct her PhD at Cambridge.

Thanks to the financial support received to conduct her research, Luisa is now in the third year of her PhD in Medical Sciences at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and can pursue her research interest, Mental Health. Specifically, Luisa studies how social media and digital technologies relate to mental health in young people. In recent years, there has been an increase in mental health conditions:
In 2017, in the UK, 1 in 8 (12%) of 5 - 19 year olds had at least one mental health condition.
In 2022, in the UK, 18% of 7 - 16 year olds and 22% of 17 - 24 year olds had a probable mental health condition.
Source: NHS Digital.

For research purposes, adolescence is defined as ages 10 – 24, so most students at Churchill fall into this category. This means that almost a quarter of students may have a mental health condition during their time at Churchill.
The increased diagnostic level could be a result of a greater mental health awareness or other factors. However, many worry that social media use might also be a contributing factor. Young people spend between five and seven hours online every day. Overall, research shows that increased time spent on social media correlates with an increase in depression and anxiety in the general population only to a small extent. In her research, Luisa investigates which aspects of social media use relate to mental health, in both positive and negative ways, with a specific focus on clinical populations (i.e. young people affected by long-term and recurrent mental health symptoms).
The first part of Luisa’s research is in the pre-print stage and comprised a systemic review and meta-analysis combining all the quantitative research on anxiety and depression since the beginning of Facebook (2007) to the present day (2023). When analysing and interpreting the data that has been collected by other scientists, Luisa found that less than 10% of the 143 studies looked at young people actually at risk of mental health conditions. Research has largely been on the general population studies and does not differentiate between non- or sub-clinical anxiety and depression, and clinical anxiety and depression. More research on clinical populations is needed to study those adolescents that may be more at risk due to pre-existing mental health symptoms.
The next stage of Luisa’s research includes a comparison of social media use in clinical versus non-clinical groups using National Survey data. This will be crucial to assess differences in social media use also within clinical groups. For instance, adolescents with anxiety may be more likely to compare themselves to others online, while young people with depression may be more likely to spend hours doom scrolling.
Luisa is also looking at social media usage and mood over 15 days. Mood is an indicator of mental health that can have short-term fluctuations, similarly to wellbeing, so daily questionnaires are key to capturing those changes. The final part of Luisa’s research takes the form of qualitative interviews with sixty young people. These are ninety-minute online discussions with groups of five adolescents. The groups are divided into male, female and non-binary/trans groups, as well as the age groups 16-19 and 19-22, and Luisa leads discussions around their social media use, identity, and wellbeing. Identity development is a key transition that happens from childhood to adulthood. Towards the end of childhood, young people start facing questions such as “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?”. In answering those questions, they develop a sense of identity.
Luisa’s research investigates the interplay of identity development, social media use and wellbeing. Preliminary results suggest that there are benefits to social media usage as well as risks, and those are different for different groups and individuals. For example, the non-binary/trans group found social media empowering as it helped them to find a community with people who are like them or are on the same journey as them. Peers matter to young people more than anything else, and so being in contact with friends and being seen by others is important. In a focus group with 16–18-year-olds, adolescents reported that staying in contact with friends and close ones contributes to higher feelings of wellbeing.
Overall, Luisa hopes that her research will get translated into policy, education, schools and clinical practice. If social media use can be a risk, then Luisa hopes we can design interventions and suggest different ways of using social media.
Her research hasn’t affected her usage of digital technology – she has social media accounts!
You can help the College to support the mental health and wellbeing of its students by making a donation to the Student Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund this Giving Day.