All in a day’s work

Becoming a doctor is a long and arduous process.  It involves many years of study and more of practice.  It is inconceivable that this process leaves those who go through it untouched.  This process is called professional socialisation.  It confers values, and behaviours on the participants, and these help to mark our profession out from […]

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In the land of the blind…

Leadership is one of those areas of medical training that is increasing in prevalence, and the number of schemes to ensure that medical leaders are available within the workforce is ever expanding. Some in our profession feel that the ‘leaders’ who are ‘trained’ seem to have few leadership qualities, and even less legitimacy to lead […]

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Did you choose them, or did they choose you?

  Medical stereotypes are a well known, ranging from the hippy-esque GP, to the man-mountain of an orthopaedic surgeon, via the suave and sophisticated plastic surgeon.  I’m not entirely sure what the stereotype of a chest physician is, but I would be grateful if you could let me know… These stereotypes, and perceptions of who goes […]

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Look not for the fleck in your brother’s eye, but the gorilla in your own…

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 […]

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Three pipe chest pain…

Medicine is no longer quite so full of time to ponder as it once seems to have been.  Rumination and consideration have taken a back seat to efficiency.  Protocols and pathways seem to be the order of the day, and once a patient is on a pathway, it can be very difficult to get them […]

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Wait – did I just hear a zebra going past?

There is an often quoted medical witticism, that originated in 1940’s Maryland: ‘When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra’   Suffice to say, there aren’t many zebras in Maryland… In the rough and tumble of acute medical admissions, there are an increasing number of horses in the herd to contend […]

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A disease by any other name…

  As a UK medical graduate, working in a London Hospital, it is fair to say that my CV doesn’t contain a huge diversity of workplaces, or populations served.  However, it is striking how many different levels of health literacy I encounter within the working week. I have had conversations with patients to correct the […]

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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 […]

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I am conflicted…are you?

  I am conflicted… and it is down to a couple of papers in this May’s PMJ that look at the development of a new tool for assessing the performance of trainees in a key medical task. Most nights – or at least 2 a week – I spend a portion of my evening logging […]

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Service, safety and training – a tricky trio.

The National Health Service is more than a health service, is is perhaps one of the biggest postgraduate universities in the world.  Within the corridors, operating theatres, and wards of the hospitals in the UK, healthcare professionals are learning. They are taught by example every day, and increasingly are allocated time out of the service […]

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