A little bit of a swirl around a decade-old paper by @iona_heath on the trouble with turning a patient’s experience into something that might require medically fixing that was floated about twitter recently. The paper, which is densely written and has lots of lovely quotes from proper writers, and speak of many aspects of doctoring, holds to a […]
Category: practice of medicine
Parity of esteem
Lots of my clinical work, with children and young people with cancer, requires the team I work with to understand physical and psychological elements of a young person, and their family’s, health. I also know, mainly from working groups and Twitter, that there is a statutory requirement to work to parity of esteem for […]
Time to rename the terrible twos?
There are many phrasings which make me wince. Some of them are obviously pedantry – I inherited a dislike of the phrase “septic screen” from Peter Daish, preferring the more correct “sepsis screen”. Folks who have worked with me could probably list another dozen easy ways to press my buttons. A more recent phrase which […]
View from across the bridge
The photo on the left is from @bad_diabetic, and I think many of you may have seen it by now. It represents a years worth of twice-daily insulin injections. It’s striking, isn’t it? (When you add to that the 5-6 daily load of many regimes, it becomes worse.) Looking from across the bridge, from the […]
Guest Blog: When it all backfires
Although vaccines are probably one of the most effective public health interventions to reduce mortality and morbidity, it’s apparent that vaccine ‘scares’, often fueled by mass-media have caused some parents to question their value and safety. Wile we paediatricians try hard to keep vaccination rates up, we don’t know how effective are our messages or […]
Guest Blog: My campaign for free-range consultants
You may not have noticed, but there was a subtle shift in Britain’s food a couple of years ago. After many years of campaigning, most notably on the telly by bucolic chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall but also by such animal welfare luminaries as PETA and Compassion in World Farming, the UK finally got rid of battery […]
What’s in a name?
A guest post from @tweediatrics. Last week, a discussion surfaced on Twitter regarding the use of “affectionate” names with patients. It started from this, tweeted by an A+E consultant in the UK: “Colleague disciplined for calling a 90 yr old lady ‘my dear’ & ‘darling’. She had no issues with them. Are we being too PC? […]
If the patient knows more than you do …
I spend some of my time working in a hospice for children and young people, and much of that time I know I am looking after patients who, themselves or their parents, know more about their condition than I do. Dealing with this – when I’m asked to review someone who has something I know I should […]
Guest Post. Positive feedback
It seems almost every day that a negative healthcare story makes its way into the headlines; missed diagnoses; missed opportunities; repeated failings that suggest a lack of learning from previous serious incidents. While the issues raised by these stories may be significant, the articles rarely present a balanced account. The distorted information is presented for […]
What’s the core of your doctoring?
Imagine you are a US marine – and your colleague in enemy territory has captured an insurgent and was holding a gun to his head, threatening to shoot the unarmed prisoner. As retweeted by our E&P Editor @ian_wac, there’s already an excellent blog on this but the answer is – probably – to shout “Marines […]