The PMJ blog has been running for 2 and a half years, and in that time I have looked at many aspects of medical practice and education that have been thrown up by papers published in the PMJ. As time has gone on, we have had several submissions to the journal which seem to fit […]
Tag: medical education
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Observe, record, tabulate, communicate…
When I was knee high to a grasshopper, I had a teacher that used to be incredibly irritating. Instead of getting away with a lucky guess, or a grasp at a faded memory, we had to be able to ‘show our workings.’ This meant we had to understand where our answers came from, from first […]
Our caring profession
The rigours of life as a junior doctor are well described, both in popular modern classics like House of God by Samuel Shem and the television series Scrubs, but also in lesser known works, like A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov. There are common themes – imposter syndrome, fear of killing patients, bullying […]
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 […]
It’s good to talk…
When I think about my work on the acute medical unit, or my clinics, it is almost mind boggling, the number of interactions I have with other humans – trainees, consultant colleagues, radiographers, radiologists, professionals from other hospitals, biochemists, nurses, physios, therapists, and of course – patients. As Atul Gawande points out in this splendid […]