A few years ago, as I was attending a medical dinner in London with 500 or more senior medical colleagues, I was disturbed that the guest of honour began his speech with the phrase: ‘We all understand that the most important ‘qualities’ of any doctor are compassion and empathy.’ I was even more concerned that there appeared […]
In an age where medicine can do more than ever before to delay dying, is death sometimes now seen as failure in the medical profession? Failure to diagnose soon enough, failure to prescribe the correct treatment, failure to discover a radical new therapy? Or is death seen by some as a treatment choice? An ‘opt-out’ […]
I used to dream about being a nurse. There was me, in my nice little fantasy world, dressed in lilac with a frilly lace cap taking pulses and chatting to kindly patients all day. Oh how different is the reality! On day one as a student nurse on the wards, I was thrown straight into […]