The obituary by Charles Warlow of Ann McPherson showed that she was not only a bilingual but a trilingual clinician, and we have to ensure that her example will stimulate others to follow her leadership and use their experience as patients or carers to change health services for the better. […]
Category: Muir Gray
Muir Gray: Two cheers for bureaucracy, four cheers for ants
We are in the throes of debating the structure of the NHS for, I think, the 20th time in my professional life, but structure is, in my experience, of little importance compared with the two other components of an organisation – systems and culture, and what happens in the minds of individual clinicians and patients. […]
Muir Gray: Japan, a little good news
I have been to Japan on a number of occasions and learned a great deal from the people I have met there, and from what I have read. […]
Muir Gray: We need bilingual clinicians for population medicine
Without diluting the clinician’s traditional commitment to the individual patient, the clinical community also has a broader responsibility to the community that provides the resources for health services. The new responsibilities of clinicians in the 21st century are for: […]
Muir Gray: Bye Bye Quality 2.0
I received some criticism for the blog Bye Bye Quality (Hello Value), as a record company might have labelled it, but most reaction was positive. Where it was not this indicated that I had not made clear enough the fact that quality improvement – doing things better – does add value, but the issue is […]
Muir Gray: Viva Wittgenstein
The single greatest influence on my work has been the inscrutable, often incomprehensible Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher and MRC Lab Technician. Much of his writing I find very difficult. The early paragraphs in Philosophical Investigations are a good introduction but even easier, for me, was the great Ray Monk Biography and the fascinating account of the […]
Muir Gray: Bye Bye Quality
The nasal tones of the Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love, Hello Loneliness” are very familiar to people who were young in the fifties and healthcare now faces a similar paradigm shift from quality to value — Bye Bye Quality, Hello Value. The debate is sharpest in the United States because healthcare is the battleground of that republic. There are […]
Muir Gray: What is helping?
Raymond Tallis’ excellent Times article on Humanity on 17 February made me reflect on helping, a topic about which I had been forced to rethink by Edgar Schein’s new book on helping. Schein is one of my heroes. His work on organisational culture has been a major influence on me in the last decade and […]