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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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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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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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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I took the road less traveled by…

Picture the scene – it’s the wee small hours, say around 0330, when the energy really ebbs on a night shift – it is still pitch black and the gentle lightening in the east is still at least a couple of hours away. You’ve been on the go since you started your shift at 2030 […]

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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 […]

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