Joe Collier on tackling breaches in the personal professional divide

How best to set the ways we communicate with each other, and so to establish our “rules of engagement”, can be difficult’. Moreover, any “rules” we establish may vary over time, either in the long term (plenty of doctors who meet in the work place later marry), or more acutely if circumstances change (one moment […]

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Louise Kenny: Lost for words

It wasn’t until the last couple of weeks that I began to have terrible, panic-stricken nightmares about my dreadful communication skills.  I wake in a trembling state, sweating because I can’t remember how to ask my patient ‘Does the pain radiate anywhere else? Does it come and go?  Is it sharp, stabbing pain?’ In my […]

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Frances Dixon on month two at medical school

We are well into the first term now, and we are starting to do some modules that are not just straight science. One of these is an epidemiology module. I was a little apprehensive about this, as someone had told me that epidemiology was “just health statistics”. But when we started, I realised it wasn’t […]

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