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Showing results for tags 'Doctor'.
Found 498 results
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Content ArticleNHS chiefs and regulators have written to hospital bosses admitting winter could be so bad NHS staff may have to "depart from established procedures" to care for patients. Letter says regulators will take the challenging situations into context...
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Content ArticleEmer Joyce is a Cardiologist at Mater University Hospital in Dublin who developed myocarditis as a result of a Covid-19 infection. This article by Professor Joyce in the European Journal of Heart Failure aims to "give a birds-eye view of the physician as patient, the sub-specialist as sub-specialist condition sufferer, the one on the far side of the bed as the one in the bed." She also looks at the pattern of previously healthy, highly active healthcare professionals developing serious long-term health issues as a result of Covid-19.
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Content ArticleEarlier this year, information technology (IT) systems at one of the largest hospital trusts in the NHS stopped working for 10 days. This was the latest in a long history of NHS IT system failures across primary and secondary care. As “paperless” is now the default operating mode for many healthcare systems globally, IT failures block access to records, prevent clinicians from ordering investigations, restrict service provision, and bring to a halt the everyday business of healthcare. Increasing digital transformation means such failures are no longer mere inconvenience but fundamentally affect our ability to deliver safe and effective care. They result in patient harm and increased costs. There is a growing disconnect between government messaging promoting a digital future for healthcare (including artificial intelligence) and the lived experience of clinical staff coping daily with ongoing IT problems., writes Joe Zhang and Hutan Ashrafia in a BMJ Editorial. Digital capabilities exist in a strict hierarchy, with IT infrastructure as the foundational layer. This digital future will not materialise without closer attention to crumbling IT infrastructure and poor user experiences.
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Content ArticleWhen Joe Fassler's wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, their trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
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Content ArticleWe need a public register to show if healthcare professionals are in the pay of industry – or more patients will suffer, writes Margaret McCartney following the publication of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review. Hospitals in England are meant to publish registers of interest of staff – but a 2016 study shows that only a minority give the details they should. A publicly accessible digital register, updated at least annually and compelled by the regulator, would create transparency and get rid of the huge amount of work that campaigners have had to do to untangle where conflicts lie. Declarations alone can’t sort the problems of conflicted medicine. But a public register would allow us to know whose advice isn’t independent. We will still need to be alert to the unintended consequences of a register, and research will be needed. The UK is lagging behind. Kath Sansom, a journalist who founded the Sling the Mesh campaign, told Margaret: “I had no idea that I couldn’t trust my doctor or surgeon to give the best advice. It is essential that medics declare industry funding.”
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Content ArticleThe aim of this paper is to raise awareness of the impact menopause is having on the workforce, as well as to issue recommendations and help healthcare organisations, managers, and employers to better support health care workers so that they do not leave the workforce or suffer in silence if they struggle with managing menopause symptoms.
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Content ArticleWhile many physicians may avoid discussing the subject, a study showed that who gets addressed with the honorific “Dr.” may depend on gender, degree and specialty.
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Content ArticleAppalling racial inequities in health exist in nearly every realm that researchers have examined. These inequities are a dramatic manifestation of the structural violence that plagues our society. Deborah Cohan, an obstetrician, gives her perspective on this in her article in the New England Journal of Medicine. "How am I confronting the underlying forces that facilitate increased suffering and death among certain groups because of their skin color? Although it’s necessary, it is not enough for me to provide respectful health care to pregnant women of color. If I truly want to be part of the solution, I need to explore those parts of me that are most unwholesome, embarrassing, unflattering, and generally not discussed in the context of one’s career." Her goal is to dismantle the insidious thoughts that reinforce a hierarchy based on race, education, and other markers of privilege that separate her from others. "These thoughts, fed by implicit bias, are more common than I find easy to admit. Although I know not to believe everything I think, I also know that thoughts guide attention, and attention guides actions. Until I bring to light and hold myself accountable for my own racist tendencies, I am contributing to racism in health care."
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Content ArticlePatient Safety Movement's Dr Donna Prosser is joined by Dr Steven Deeks, Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, and Dr Jake Suett, Staff Grade Anaesthetist and Intensive Care Doctor, UUK, to discuss the long term implications of COVID-19 from clinical and personal perspectives. Dr Deeks shares the research around long COVID-19 symptoms and Dr Suett provides a personal anecdote of his experience with symptoms that have lasted months. Dr. Suett shares information about the COVID symptom study, which consists of an international mobile app to track COVID-19 symptoms over time.
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Content ArticleThe Doctor is the BMA’s award-winning magazine for members. Read the latest articles, interviews and comment from the magazine.
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Content ArticleThe successful implementation of clinical practice guidelines should improve quality of care by decreasing inappropriate variation and expediting the application of effective advances to practice. However, despite wide promulgation, practice guidelines have had limited effect on changing physician behavior. Cabana et al. conducted a systematic review of the barriers to physician adherence to clinical practice guidelines, practice parameters, clinical policies or national consensus statements. They found that physician adherence is dependent on physician awareness (31 examples), agreement (68 examples), self-efficacy (13 examples), outcome expectancy (12 examples), motivation (3 examples), and the absence of external barriers to perform guideline recommendations (62 examples). The findings suggest that studies describing interventions to improve physician adherence may not be generalisable, since barriers in one setting may not be present in another. Using this analysis, the authors propose a framework which describes the barriers that must be overcome to improve physician adherence. This framework can be used (1) as a method to profile barriers or sources of poor adherence and thus (2) as a diagnostic tool to standardise and select appropriate interventions to improve adherence. The selection of interventions to change physician behaviour has been haphazard in the past. This analysis offers a more rational approach towards improving physician adherence to practice guidelines as well as a framework for further research.
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Content ArticleEngaging with patients is a time-honoured tradition in medicine, and by no means a new concept. A great physician-patient relationship is something that every patient would love to have. Back in the day, the physician was like Marcus Welby – they would visit your house and know all about you and your family. This arrangement was not only great for improving the physician-patient relationship, but also improved health outcomes by providing the most patient-centered care possible. Today, many medical professionals face some new challenges in making that all-important connection. These days, doctors are pressed for time and don’t have that same one-on-one relationship with their patients. While doctors can pull up a chair and speak to the patient at eye level, technology is playing a greater role these days. The increasing role of technology in healthcare has been advantageous in some ways, but has posed new challenges, too. In this blog, David Mayer explores the challenges physicians face.
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David Oliver: Should doctors be on first name terms?
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Culture
In this BMJ perspective, David Oliver, a consultant in geriatrics and acute general medicine, discusses whether doctors should keep with tradition of using their professional titles amongst colleagues and patients, or whether, as in his own hospital, first names should be used as part of a wider focus on patient safety and a human factors culture. Of course, professional roles and hierarchies remain important in healthcare. Different people have different training or experience, and it’s important to have clear team leadership and responsibilities, especially in emergency care. But first names are part of a push to build strong team working, flatten hierarchies, and improve patient safety by making it easier for less senior team members or different clinical professionals to question senior doctors and “stop the line” before avoidable harm occurs. -
Content ArticleJunior doctors can find the process of doing an audit helpful in gaining an understanding of the healthcare process—Andrea Benjamin, BMJ's clinical editor, explains how to do one.
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Content ArticleThis article from Ashton et al. outlines how one health system in the United States sought to make antibody testing available to staff as a strategy to decrease anxiety and improve sense making around the crisis.
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Content ArticleThis article from Petriceks and Schwartz, published in Palliative & Supportive Care, describes a four-element approach centered on Goals, Options, Opinions and Documentation that serves as an effective structure for clinicians to have conversations with patients and families to address care management when the path forward is unclear.
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Foundation Doctor Handbook App
Claire Cox posted an article in Apps for health and care
Survive the wards with key information at your fingertips with this top rated app. It provides clear and succinct information to help UK Foundation doctors navigate some of the common clinical scenarios that they'll face on the wards. -
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Your Life In My Hands: a Junior Doctor's Story
Claire Cox posted an article in Recommended books and literature
'I am a junior doctor. It is 4 a.m. I have run arrest calls, treated life-threatening bleeding, held the hand of a young woman dying of cancer, scuttled down miles of dim corridors wanting to sob with sheer exhaustion, forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink, drawn on every fibre of strength that I possess to keep my patients safe from harm.' How does it feel to be spat out of medical school into a world of pain, loss and trauma that you feel wholly ill-equipped to handle? To be a medical novice who makes decisions which - if you get them wrong - might forever alter, or end, a person's life? To toughen up the hard way, through repeated exposure to life-and-death situations, until you are finally a match for them? In this heartfelt, deeply personal account of life as a junior doctor in today's health service, former television journalist turned doctor, Rachel Clarke, captures the extraordinary realities of ordinary life on the NHS front line. From the historic junior doctor strikes of 2016 to the 'humanitarian crisis' declared by the Red Cross, the overstretched health service is on the precipice, calling for junior doctors to draw on extraordinary reserves of what compelled them into medicine in the first place - and the value the NHS can least afford to lose - kindness. -
Content ArticleThe BMA sent out its first survey at the beginning of April. The most recent survey closed on 13 August and nearly 4,000 doctors took part. The 13 August 2020 results found: 60% of doctors said they were not very, or not at all, confident in their local health economy managing demand as normal NHS services resume. Half of doctors said they were not very, or not at all, confident in being able to manage a second wave of COVID-19. 26% of doctors said that in the last two weeks non-Covid demand had increased to pre-pandemic levels, with 17% saying that demand is now even higher than it was before.
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Content ArticleOn 10 May 2017, the RCP (Royal College of Physicians) hosted ‘Learning from mortality reviews to improve patient safety’ as part of it's Keeping patients safe seminar series. The event discussed how the National Mortality Case Record Review (NMCRR) can improve care and keep patients safe. As well as hearing from the RCP's National Mortality Case Record Review (NMCRR) team about their work and the results of the programme's pilot phase, the seminar was an opportunity to hear about the wide-ranging work the RCP is undertaking to support improvements in patient safety.
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Primary care cancer toolkit
Claire Cox posted an article in Cancers
This Primary Care Cancer Toolkit provides a collection of key resources about cancer prevention, diagnosis and care relevant for the primary care setting. It provides links to current guidance, continuing professional development resources, patient information, and information for those involved in commissioning. -
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Improving cancer patient safety within the emergency department
Martin Hogan posted an article in Cancers
I'm Martin. In this blog I want to talk about my role as a Macmillan acute oncology clinical nurse specialist (CNS) and what our team has done to improve patient safety within the acute ward of our hospitals. Coming from a non-oncology background there was a lot to learn when I moved into acute oncology. My background was mainly acute cardiac and respiratory, but this allowed me to notice how powerful and time effective the presence of an acute oncology CNS could be in improving cancer patient safety within the emergency department. -
Content ArticleIn this Editorial in the BMJ, Albert Wu introduced the phrase ‘second victim’ in an attempt to highlight the emotional effects for staff involved in a medical error and the need for emotional support to help their recovery.
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Content ArticleThe Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) has exclusive interviews from leading figures in healthcare on their website, these podcasts focus on a variety of topics within medicine and healthcare, covering everything from mental health and paediatric care to the medical workforce crisis and patient safety. In this episode, Kaji Sritharan talks to Dr Dominic King, Health Lead of DeepMind about the role of Artificial Intelligence and the development and introduction of Digital Technologies into the NHS.
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Content ArticleIn this video, Prof Kevin Fong, Consultant Anaesthetist at UCL (University College London) is joined in a panel discussion by three other experts in Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE): Dr Fiona Kelly, Consultant Anaesthetist and Intensivist at Royal United Hospitals Bath and lead of the Difficult Airway Society (DAS) group on HFE Prof Chris Frerk, Consultant Anaesthetist at Northampton General Hospital and CHFG (Clinical Human Factors Group)Trustee Mr Clinton John, Operating Department Practitioner and Head for Clinical Education at UCLH. They will discuss and share their top tips about HFE in the context of airway management. This forms part of a free course from Future Learn Airway Matters course to help others explore key concepts underlying safe, multidisciplinary airway management.
