10 days ago we witnessed the nadir in our situation of insecurity and crime. The death of 52 innocent people after a fire at a casino caused by a drug gang, just half a kilometer from where I work. The eerie feeling (especially in my town) was something I had never seen. The next morning at the university where I work, ... Read More »

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It is now mid August and she has lost much of her splendour. In the last week her vibrant reds and subtle blues have faded and she no longer turns heads. How very different from two weeks ago. Then, we were living a dream that took five years to materialise. I am talking about the sheer beauty of our meadow burgeoning with ... Read More »

We had key differences to resolve so inevitably our meeting was going to be strained. Ben had suggested the tea room on the first floor of one of London’s grander main-line station hotels. It was seedy and costly with waitresses over-ingratiating and over made-up. But discussions went well. The quietness there allowed ... Read More »

It’s that time of year again. This article takes a look at a day in the life of a junior doctor going through the annual August job changeover trauma.

Today is your last day in this job, in this specialty, and in this hospital. After leaving drinks last night you had to go home and pack everything and clean the house in order to move out in the morning. You just managed to get the overnight move done and get into work today, but now it is late afternoon and instead of being ready to leave you realise that no-one has yet checked the blood results for the patients on your ward, relatives are demanding to be seen, and only you are here to deal with it all …
 In the morning you are on your way to the new hospital, lost in a one-way system, trying to park in a car park for which you don’t have a permit, trying to find your way to the induction, being refused a library card, realising you don’t have the passwords for any computer access, and finding that the other doctors in your team are on holiday… but there’s no time to worry about any of that as you already have a barrage of questions from nurses and patients, and then a ward round to go on - Good Luck for tomorrow to all readers!

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Claims championing the prowess of women have come thick and fast in the last weeks. First, it was over a meal when one of my sons argued forcefully that women have always been the great civilisers, and that it is through their influence on men that people live together as citizens and that society has developed. This aspect ... Read More »

Some things are important more for what they represent than for what they are, and for me one such is the humble shoelace. These long, thin and usually featureless strands have been threaded through shoe eyelets for over a thousand years and have changed little. There has been competition – buckles, elastic, zips, ... Read More »

Last week a work experience student spent an afternoon shadowing me. During my time as a medical student and junior doctor I have had a variety of work experience students shadow me. They have ranged from the incredibly enthusiastic and committed students who already knew the answers to many of the questions in teaching sessions, to the completely disinterested students sent along by their parents. It can be hard to know how to structure the week for work experience students to make sure they get a good taste of life as a medical student or doctor and that they don’t get bored without having to go out of your way too much in an already busy job.  Other than being nice to them and taking them to lunch and making sure they’re not lost, what can we do to make their experience a positive and interesting one?

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Last week the phone rang. It was my very worried friend Ron seeking advice. He told me how he had just learned that his elderly mother had developed a life threatening medical condition. For many years she had been taking a blood-thinning drug following a heart operation.  Earlier that evening Nurse X had collared Ron ... Read More »

Nobody likes writing their CV; it’s boring, time-consuming and usually the last thing you want to do when it's 1am and you’ve got a job application to send off before the deadline. For the well-prepared, however, there are plenty of things you can do to make writing or updating your CV a much easier (if not exactly exciting) prospect.

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