Penicillin. Viagra. Aspartame. X-Rays. No, this is not the world’s strangest shopping list. One began with mould on a petri dish, another with an inconvenient side effect, another with an accidental sweet taste, and another with a mysterious glow from a fluorescent screen. We often tell these stories as accidents, side effects or lucky breaks. […]
Latest articles
Clinicians already reason like designers – they were never given the instruments. By Daniel Steenstra
There is a sentence most clinical leaders have heard in some form: “You have excellent clinical skills, but you’ll need to develop your management thinking.” It is delivered kindly, usually with a course recommendation attached. It is also, on the evidence, backwards. Consider what a clinician does with an undifferentiated presentation. She gathers symptoms and […]
Equity: The Final Frontier of Quality Improvement. By Thomas Merrill
Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity (AFHE) brings together health professionals from around the world and across disciplines to build leaders, create solutions and grow community. As we celebrate our tenth anniversary, we are reflecting on what our community has learned and accomplished while looking ahead at the future of health equity. Through The Future of […]
Reclaiming the Human Dimension in Healthcare & Leadership. By Louise Younie and Anna Baverstock
‘Creative Enquiry helps us have safety nets for our own emotions and situations, which directly improves how we care for patients. Everyone I know in foundation training goes through all sorts of difficult experiences that we have next to no time to recover from – both physically and emotionally. [Creative Enquiry] supports us to stay […]
Learning That Changes. By Vanessa Audris Lim
(Also known as The Time Göran Hijacked My Podcast and Made It Better) I was hosting a podcast, and I had a plan. I was hosting three leaders whose work I deeply respected and admired: April Kyle from Southcentral Foundation in Alaska, Sarah Woolnough from The King’s Fund in the United Kingdom, and Göran Henriks […]
Inclusive leadership as a clinical imperative: from personal journey to system change. By Sarah Todd
A moment that changed how I saw leadership Early in my career, I witnessed a senior colleague use racially biased language about a patient, then deliver a lower standard of care. I felt shocked, angry and unsure how to respond. At the time, I didn’t have the language to describe what I had seen. But […]
“I can no longer keep patients safe” – Heatwaves and Health Workers: time for political action. By Matthew Lee
The UK has (so far) experienced five heatwaves in one summer. Record temperatures have been repeatedly broken and in the June heatwave records show that the London Ambulance Service responded to a record number of life-threatening emergencies, the highest in its history. (1,2) From the UKHSA’s Health Effects of Climate Change report, we know we […]
What the Team Feels: Psychodynamics, Risk and Reflection in Forensic Psychiatry. By Angela Misra and Farheen Ebrahim
Teams function best when they can reflect on their emotional responses. This blog will explore how reflection can be used in stressful team situations to improve decision-making using examples from forensic psychiatry. Team dynamics are particularly intensified in forensic psychiatry when treating service users who evoke strong and differing emotional responses. Leadership in this context […]
Ending with the Beginning in Mind: Reflections from the FMLM National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellowship. By Lynda Odoh
My favourite part of a run is not the run itself. It is the moment I stop my watch. The moment I look back. How many miles did I cover? Where did I find my rhythm? Where did I slow down? How does today compare with yesterday? Last week? Last month? There is something deeply […]
Continuity as a System Behaviour Across Care Boundaries. By Phil Whatling
Introduction Continuity of care is often discussed in terms of patients seeing their usual GP. For many patients in general practice long-term therapeutic relationships remain both one of the profession’s greatest strengths and central to how care is experienced. What clinicians across general practice, community services and hospitals see each day suggests a broader reality. […]