One of the things about being an “old guy” is that you realise how extraordinarily slow we are at doing the right thing. You also see wheels being constantly reinvented. This morning, for example, I heard on the radio how the Health Select Committee had “discovered” that 10% of people suffer harm on being admitted […]
In my early twenties I was felled by a bout of mental illness. It started with a panic attack. I was standing on the station at Leamington Spa waiting for a train and shivering slightly in the early autumnal chill when, without warning, a paralysing wave of fear broke over me. The terror that swept […]
I have just come back from a gathering of the “big dogs of British medicine” at Highclere Castle, home of Lord Carnarvon, who participated in the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. The point of the meeting was to provide the Royal College of Physicians working party on future doctors with material for their deliberations. […]
It is often said of military planners that they spend their time preparing to fight the last battle, not the next one. The same could be said of regulators. Take research ethics. Recently I was with the WHO in Geneva looking at the regulation of research during health emergencies. The question we were invited to […]
I associate camps with wood smoke, burnt sausages, and filled latrines marked with crosses, but HealthCamp is different. It’s about innovation, and I attended my first one last week—at the soulless Excel Centre in Docklands, LondonHeathCamp begins with lightning talks. In under two minutes participants must pose one problem they’d like to discuss. We had […]
The Student BMJ is asking, via Twitter, for accounts of people’s first days as a doctor, and their request has for me brought back painful and partially suppressed memories. I started in the Eastern General in Edinburgh on Sunday 1 August 1976 and experienced my first death from medical error on the Monday. Maybe this […]
If there was a pill that would improve your interaction with patients by 50% would you take it? I imagine you would. Well, I don’t know of such pill and can’t think that there will ever be such a thing, but there is a non-pharmacological way to improve you consulting—it’s called “values based practice.” […]
Last week was a research-filled week for me. Two biomedical papers to review in the early part of the week and the South Asian Forum for Health Research (SAFHeR) meeting towards the end. Could not ask for more. […]
Audiences can be fickle things. Last week I clambered down from my ivory tower and emerged, blinking, onto a brilliantly-lit podium at the Cheltenham Science Festival. The theme of the evening: Playing God – Risk in Surgery. I was on a panel with two surgeons, but my job was to do the ethics. I figured […]
I have a fondness for flowcharts. I also attempt to teach doctors to prefer short words when they are writing. So, when I found myself exchanging emails with an American doctor who insisted on referring to the COPE flowcharts as algorithms, I was determined to teach him the error of his ways. But first, I […]