The challenges of looking after children with complex medical conditions have been widely acknowledged, and a model frequently proposed to address this is of a ‘key worker’ – an identified health care professional who is a point of first contact, organiser and font of locally applicable knowledge to improve care and reduce distress. In the […]
Category: practice of medicine
A Patient I’ll Always Remember
It’s been a feature of Schwartz rounds in many institutions to have, as a break from the team-based, thematic presentations, the odd session where a few folk offer to sit on the panel and talk to the title “A Patient I’ll Always Remember” (For those who don’t have them, Schwartz rounds are sessions focussed on […]
Gender sensitive medicine
Last year the worldwide Movember charitable organisation, in addition to having a LOT to answer for when it came to ridiculous photographs on social media and scratchy snogging, held a symposium on Boys’/Mens’ Mental Health. Crashing into this again recently made me sit up and ask “Do we paediatrician types alter our consultations / clinics […]
Guest Blog: The trials and tribulations of answering clinical questions
For a recent evidence based paediatrics assignment we had to answer and present a clinical question. I’m sure you are well acquainted with the process; construct your question in standard PICO format, search your secondary and primary sources, critically appraise the evidence and draw your conclusions. Having noted a trend towards starting lamotrigine rather than […]
Guest blog: “To Play or not to Play”?
Play in its most intimate of forms allows for free expression, exploration, joy, and excitement . For others it’s a welcome distraction. What makes play become a tool, a balance barometer, a universal subject, is when it is introduced or offered to a child/young person (CYP) who requires an intervention, treatment or one who is […]
Making decisions to limit treatment in life-limiting and life-threatening conditions in children
The revised Royal College of Paediatric and Child Health guidance on making decisions to limit treatment in life-limiting and life-threatening conditions in childhood has just been published. It provides an ethical and legal framework for practicing clinicians revised to reflect the changes in the scope and availability of advanced technology and in the emphasis and […]
What I learned from Terry Pratchett
I’ve been thinking about this for quite a long time now, and this seems like a good time. I’ve spoken about this any number of times with students in clinic, and with doctors in training. The thing is, as soon as they hear me mention Terry Pratchett, I get the judgement. Or, to be more […]
More to do – Report from the Children and Young People’s Health Outcomes Forum
The UK Government set up an independent group to advise on strategies to improve the health outcomes of children and young people (from before birth to age 25 years) in January 2012. It’s role is to challenge the outcomes seen in England and offer advice on what strategies should concentrate on to improve. A new report has […]
Shape of services?
With the publication and debate around Shape of Training (a UK-based review of how training the medical workforce will be revised for a new era of health care) there is a fair bit of … conversation … about a number of things. Some of these things include the question about how a ‘medical’ service is […]
Can we incentivise improvements in child health? (Part 2)
In an earlier post, I entered a world of capitation, fee-for-service, block contracting and incentivisation, all ways of levering people to ‘do the right thing’, and ending by asking how to know what the ‘right thing’ was. We could do this a number of ways – we can ask people; we can measure universally agreed […]