Teaching for medical graduates approaching clinical exams such as the MRCP PACES exam is an anxious time. One is expected to ‘perform’ under pressure, wary of the need to elicit signs leading to potentially outlandish diagnoses. The breadth of knowledge and skills required to confidently identify CMV retinitis at one station, followed by a complicated […]
Category: Quality Improvement
If a job’s worth doing…
Image via WM Jas on Flickr Competency based curricula have largely replaced purely knowledge-based curricula in medical education. As assessment of competency has become a seemingly endless task, the participants in medical education have often complained that learning and development has been reduced to a series of hoops to jump through or, even worse, a […]
The beauty of the written word?
Of the essential skills for doctors, writing has to be up there as one of the most important. Doctors writing has been the butt of many jokes ove the years – justifiably, and written prescriptions remain a significant source of error in hospitals up and down the land. The medical notes are another area where […]
Still only human
There is something different about medics. We stand out at university – often forming into a clique that others find difficult to fathom, break into, or tolerate. We strive to be different in many ways; we learn a huge range of facts and figures, along with new languages ( we are taught about everything from […]
What do all those numbers really mean doc?
Go into hospital nowadays, and you will do well to escape without having a blood test of some sort. Very often these are routine tests, which give doctors an overview of the state of play. There might be a few wayward figures here or there – but the doctors will ignore them, or explain […]
It’s not about the form… it’s the human touch
There are several problems which rear their ugly head every few months / years in healthcare and yet seem impossible to crack. In the main they pass by, unnoticed by the great and the good, and not usually causing discernible problems for patients. But, time taken to gather phlebotomy equipment, delays in prescribing ‘TTAs’ and […]