"I feel privileged to be in the position to deliver care”: Meet Dr Brian Wang
Dr Brian Wang is a junior doctor in foundation year 2. An alumnus of Imperial College London, he is currently doing a four-month rotation in emergency medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. Here, Brian shares his passion for medicine and what inspired him to found the charity In2MedSchool to help support a new generation into medicine.
What is your role at the Trust?
I am a Foundation Year 2 doctor, and I am currently doing my emergency medicine four-month rotation. Prior to this, my rotation was in gastroenterology, and I am due to stay at the Trust for one year overall. After that, I will see where my rotation takes me.
Have you always known this was the career path you wanted to pursue?
Yes, I wanted to go into healthcare from a very young age. When I moved to the UK from China around the age of eight, I struggled with English and maths at school but science just made sense to me. My mum was a nurse before I was born and I would read her nursing books for hours on end, particularly the areas that focused on the heart. This confirmed to me that cardiology was the area of medicine that I wanted to specialise in.
My sister has followed in my footsteps: she is currently a medical student at Imperial College and my dad is a professor in geophysics there, too. So, it was through my mum that I fell in love with science and through my dad that I fell in love with academia – I even took three years out of medical school to complete my PhD with the National Heart and Lung Institute. I qualified from medical school in 2021, right in the heart of the pandemic, and I helped out in hospitals with the first wave of Covid whilst revising for my final exams.
What do you love most about your job?
I have had a really positive experience as a doctor so far, particularly during my rotation in emergency medicine. I have had the opportunity to learn lots in a short space of time and the responsibility to make impactful decisions with support around me. The A&E department at Charing Cross Hospital is amazing; everyone is pulling in the same direction, from nurses to doctors to healthcare assistants.
Overall, I have had an incredible two years and my experience has been everything I hoped medicine would be and more. I feel privileged to be in the unique position of delivering care to people who come to us in their greatest time of need.
You recently received the 2023 Emerging Alumni Leader Award from Imperial College! Tell us more about this award.
The Imperial Alumni Awards have been running for four years and they recognise exceptional professional and academic achievements. I am humbled to be one of the most recent graduates to have won an award considering I only graduated a year and a half ago.
I won this award in large part because of the charity I founded in 2020 called In2MedSchool. This charity was inspired by a lot of the things I had seen during my time at med school and whilst helping with the efforts against the first wave of the pandemic.
I knew that widening participation initiatives were already doing a lot of great work, but the pandemic highlighted a lot of cracks in the healthcare system in terms of the diversity of the healthcare workforce. The charity started with a LinkedIn post appealing to medical students or doctors to come forward to help aspiring medical students from disadvantaged backgrounds with the interview and application process for med school. I thought maybe a dozen or so people would respond but the initiative exploded within the first few weeks and has continued to grow.
We are now a registered charity in England and Wales, and we also work in Scotland and Northern Ireland. We have a fantastic core committee of directors who are current medical students and/or turned junior doctors and we have over 2,000 children actively enrolled in our mentorship programme, with a surplus of 1,000 volunteers who have signed up.
The charity has evolved to incorporate different branches and arms outside of the mentorship programme, such as an events programme and an outreach programme where we are going into local communities. The charity is very much run by volunteers who come up with new ideas and who are passionate about instigating change. I merely oversee things now.
What do you want people to know about the healthcare industry, based on your experience so far?
One question I get from a lot of doctors is how they can help the next generation. One major stumbling block for a lot of the In2MedSchool mentees is that a lot of them can’t get work experience opportunities in the healthcare industry before applying to medical school.
This is problematic for two reasons. First, it means that a lot of people who apply without experience do so without knowing if medicine is right for them. Second, the personal statement has changed so that applicants must demonstrate how they have prepared for med school. If applicants have been unsuccessful in gaining work experience, then they might look at this part of the statement and question if it is even worth applying.
In2MedSchool has contacted about 200 different healthcare professionals regarding work experience opportunities but to no avail. It is often the case that successful placements happen when an individual is connected to someone who already works in the industry. The fact that medicine is still for the elite needs to change. I would encourage trusts to really concentrate their efforts into offering fair work experience opportunities. We all have a role to play in making the healthcare workforce as diverse as possible.
Lastly, what do you do to unwind outside of work and In2MedSchool?
Fitness and promoting a healthy lifestyle is another big part of who I am. As a child I played sport every weeknight after school and on weekends, and I played rugby all through university. During my PhD I qualified as a personal trainer, and I train five to six times a week for CrossFit competitions!
Find out more about career opportunities at Imperial College Healthcare.
