When I visited the clinical ethics department at Washington Hospital Center some years back, I was impressed by how acute ethical dilemmas, once resolved, led to presentations in the affected department to reflect on the problem and find ways to minimise its recurrence. These ways included imparting factual knowledge, whether medical, ethical, or legal, or […]
Daniel Sokol provides an ethicist’s point of view on the latest hearing in the case of Charlie Gard […]
Lavinia Woodward, 24, is a medical student at Oxford University. She is an aspiring heart surgeon with an excellent academic record. On 30 September 2016, under the influence of drink and drugs, she stabbed her boyfriend in the leg with a breadknife and inflicted cuts on his fingers. He sustained a 1cm leg wound and lacerations […]
A colleague is sick. Someone is needed to cover him tomorrow. There are no locums and no volunteers. Who should be selected? Few issues generate more passion and cause more heartache to doctors than filling a gap in the rota. Over the Christmas period, it is likely that tears have been shed and friendships lost […]
Last week I attended a conference for surgeons. In the hall, a poster described the case of a neurology patient who had, literally, inhaled a chicken sandwich. The surgeon, with great ingenuity, combined instruments to suction the mushy chicken embedded in the patient’s lungs. Next to the poster stood a timid medical student, one of […]