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Latest posts

Feelings do not mean failure

Posted on 10 May 2013 by Yasmin Kaur

During a busy Saturday morning on the medical assessment unit, a daughter came up to me and asked how her mum was doing.

Tags: junior doctors, secondary care, hospital practitioners, doctor-patient relationships
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Mystery of patient's incomplete history

Posted on 13 February 2013 by Tim Cantor

A middle-aged woman comes to see me in surgery. She tells me that she has had the sensation of a foreign body in her left eye for the past two and a half weeks.

Tags: doctor-patient relationships, disclosure of information
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Why don't we challenge figures of authority?

Posted on 8 February 2013 by Freda McEwan

What was the name of the US president who was assassinated in the 1960s? Turns out I don’t know. This is one of the questions testing long-term episodic memory in the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-Revised. When I was using it to assess older adults with memory problems, some people would suggest ‘Jack Kennedy’.

Tags: junior doctors
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Lack of time muddies referral waters

Posted on 14 January 2013 by Miriam Namih

Working on-call as a medical foundation doctor 1, I clerked a woman in her late 60s who had been referred by her GP with ‘shortness of breath, query cause’. I began with the usual history taking: she had been walking in town the previous day when she became acutely short of breath. This was associated with a feeling of leg weakness but no other symptoms, and the incident had resolved itself spontaneously.

Tags: general practitioners, foundation programme year 1, secondary care
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A toe-curling mistake

Posted on 4 January 2013 by Caroline Whymark

The anaesthetist was a relatively new SHO learning her trade on the minor ops list. The surgeon was a surly locum. The patient was 12 years old with learning difficulties.

Tags: elective surgery, consultant, anaesthetics
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An absence of empathy

Posted on 7 December 2012 by Uma Rani Padmanabhi

It is that time of year, when all the paper work goes flying in the air, and you spend sleepless nights in front of the computer, sharing, scanning, uploading and submitting the documents for the ARCP (annual review of competence progression) before the deadline.

Tags: junior doctors, psychiatry, competency-based assessment
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Painful truths

Posted on 22 November 2012 by Aoife Abbey

‘I’ll be OK, won’t I? This won’t shorten my life?’

Tags: junior doctors, medical education and training, medical oncology, cancer
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Inside information

Posted on 19 November 2012 by Graham Stevenson

Confidentiality: in the form of gossip, a great deal of recreation derives from its flouting. For doctors, in contrast, it’s second nature to protect information, and piously reinforce the sixth pillar of clinical governance.

Tags: public health, primary care, patient confidentiality, custodial settings
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Meeting of minds under marshmallow towers

Posted on 9 November 2012 by Rachel Brettell

Recently I started my GP specialty training. My first teaching session, with fellow trainees from my scheme, included a team-building exercise. Our initial response? Groans all round.

Tags: junior doctors, medical education and training, general practitioners
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Remember tears when you toughen up

Posted on 1 November 2012

I once had a house officer who I found crying in the linen cupboard. We had just put an elderly patient with end-stage renal failure and recurrent bowel cancer on the Liverpool Care Pathway, and this junior doctor was devastated.

Tags: junior doctors, doctors for doctors, end of life issues
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