Fending Off Death 1 by wiebkefesch on DeviantArt Doctors are – in the main – trained to prevent death. Modern medicine has made huge advances, and life expectancies continue to rise. However, there remains only one certainty in this life – that we are all going to die. Patients in the last year of life […]
Tag: patient experience
Turning over a new leaf
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Is that a smartphone in your pocket?
Smartphones are almost ubiquitous on the wards nowadays. In a departmental meeting the other day a question popped up about the commonest reason for admission to hospital acute medical services. Out came my smartphone, and after a search, and a tweet – almost instantly (and quickly enough to furnish an answer by the end of […]