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 […]
Patients do not come with diagnoses attached to their foreheads. If only they did, huge numbers of hospital visits and admissions could be avoided. To overcome the ever increasing number of potential diagnoses, and the rising tide of illness encountered by our ageing populations, we rely ever more heavily on investigations to guide us […]
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 […]
Medicine is no longer quite so full of time to ponder as it once seems to have been. Rumination and consideration have taken a back seat to efficiency. Protocols and pathways seem to be the order of the day, and once a patient is on a pathway, it can be very difficult to get them […]
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 National Health Service is more than a health service, is is perhaps one of the biggest postgraduate universities in the world. Within the corridors, operating theatres, and wards of the hospitals in the UK, healthcare professionals are learning. They are taught by example every day, and increasingly are allocated time out of the service […]
Of the essential skills for doctors, writing has to be up there as one of the most important. Doctors writing has been the butt of many jokes ove the years – justifiably, and written prescriptions remain a significant source of error in hospitals up and down the land. The medical notes are another area where […]
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 […]