A famous quote from the eminnet paediatrician Sir Cyril Chantler was published in the BMJ in 1998: “Medicine used to be simple, ineffective, and relatively safe. It is now complex, effective, and potentially dangerous.” As medicine progresses, it is worth keeping this in mind. The complexity of modern medicine is one of the challenges […]
Are you safely socialised?
Changes in role within the medical profession are times of great upheaval. One of the most challenging is the change from being a medical student to a fully qualified doctor. A cohort of medical students qualifies every year around June/July time, and members of this cohort take their first steps on the wards and in […]
Too much information?
Medicine is an ever changing discipline. One field that continues to change the face of clinical practice, and throw up new challenges is that of radiology. The body no longer hides it’s secrets beneath skin that requires a surgeon’s skills to open up and explore, but can be encouraged to give them up through […]
What’s important to you?
Patient centred, patient focused, patient oriented, co-design, co-production, co-creation, and so on… The medical world is abuzz with the desire to make patients the central focus of all of our efforts. It is almost so blindingly obvious that patients should be at the centre of everything that we do that very often clinicians feel somewhat […]
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 […]
50% of what you are taught is wrong…
There is a phrase in medical education which often gets aired at the welcoming lecture to medical school: “50% of what we teach you over the next five years will be wrong, or inaccurate. Sadly, we don’t know which 50%” Quite why those welcoming students to a rigorous, physically and mentally demanding degree course would […]
Yes to one thing… no to the others.
One of the perennial problems that faces doctors who are in direct contact with patients is time management. It is the one resource we all have to allocate, and with the multitude of different roles we all have to play – parent / sibling / doctor / teacher / friend / spouse / […]
Is there any such thing as “IRL” ?
Social media is all pervasive – it is nigh on impossible to see an advertisement nowadays without a hastag, facebook, pinterest or twitter handle attached. Social media has been credited with sparking revolutions, riots and bringing down criminals, and is even used by the Pope to spread his message to the world. Perhaps it isn’t […]
It’s all the little things.
This week I have been privileged to be at “the Forum” or to give it it’s full title, the 19th International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare. The Forum is an impressive event – there were over 3000 delegates from 78 countries, and over the week the virtual presence of the event was significant. […]
Is it all in your head? – not quite…
A paper in the current issue of the Postgraduate Medical Journal tackles a relatively modern concern: chronic postsurgical pain. With the advent of modern anaesthetics, and advances in surgical technique, the potential for surgical intervention to tackle disease exploded. Indeed, there is now a whole industry based on surgically changing the way people look, […]