Doctors have a long and proud history of involvement in the arts. There are classic tomes published by doctors – The House of God (Shem), Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), The Story of San Michele (Munthe), The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov). The profession has also produced a number of playwrights (Chekov), and poets (Keats). This […]
Medical stereotypes are a well known, ranging from the hippy-esque GP, to the man-mountain of an orthopaedic surgeon, via the suave and sophisticated plastic surgeon. I’m not entirely sure what the stereotype of a chest physician is, but I would be grateful if you could let me know… These stereotypes, and perceptions of who goes […]
Teaching for medical graduates approaching clinical exams such as the MRCP PACES exam is an anxious time. One is expected to ‘perform’ under pressure, wary of the need to elicit signs leading to potentially outlandish diagnoses. The breadth of knowledge and skills required to confidently identify CMV retinitis at one station, followed by a complicated […]
Image via WM Jas on Flickr Competency based curricula have largely replaced purely knowledge-based curricula in medical education. As assessment of competency has become a seemingly endless task, the participants in medical education have often complained that learning and development has been reduced to a series of hoops to jump through or, even worse, a […]
I am conflicted… and it is down to a couple of papers in this May’s PMJ that look at the development of a new tool for assessing the performance of trainees in a key medical task. Most nights – or at least 2 a week – I spend a portion of my evening logging […]
The rigours of life as a junior doctor are well described, both in popular modern classics like House of God by Samuel Shem and the television series Scrubs, but also in lesser known works, like A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov. There are common themes – imposter syndrome, fear of killing patients, bullying […]
There is something different about medics. We stand out at university – often forming into a clique that others find difficult to fathom, break into, or tolerate. We strive to be different in many ways; we learn a huge range of facts and figures, along with new languages ( we are taught about everything from […]