Medical education is a major concern of the Postgraduate Medical Journal. Indeed the origins of the journal are in the need to provide medical graduates with a source of education after graduation that would keep them in touch with the goings on in the major centres of medical progress. A paper in the current issue […]
Tag: education
Professionalism – a team game
Professionalism is one of those peristent themes that run through medical education, and through the comments that are passed whenever there are concerns about clinical performance – be that the perceived clock watching engendered by the EWTD, or the failings at Mid Staffs. Very often the term is used to highlight either a failing, or […]
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 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 […]
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, […]
Medicine – a team sport
Medicine could once be practised in isolation – indeed, young doctors often found themselves working alone – a situation evocatively described by Bulgakov in his ‘Country Doctor’s Notebook.’ Nowadays, it is almost impossible to work in isolation, and team working is the norm. Atul Gawande wrote about the different approaches of Cowboys and Pit […]
Proper preparation and planning…
There is a basic assumption that medical schools prepare medical students to become doctors. One might expect that medical schools prepare medical students to broadly similar standards, and that by extension, their students would be broadly prepared for practice when they emerge blinking onto the wards each August. In a fascinating paper, Goldacre, Lambert and […]