I saw an advertisement for the Clegg scholarship in the Student BMJ magazine and decided to apply on impulse, mainly because our supervisors were urging me and my second year […]
Students
Jonny Martell: Surviving burnout
Nothing much sprung to mind. A friend had just asked me an odd question, paraphrasing the mystical scholar Andrew Harvey, “what breaks your heart the most?” Was this an early […]
Eva Dumann: So this is victory—treating adolescent idiopathic scoliosis
One of the great things about being a BMJ Clegg scholar is unlimited access to BMJ articles, coupled with enough free time to read about the weird and wonderful topics […]
Rhys Davies: Chronic frustrating syndrome
A wise man once said that he knew nothing at all except that he knew that he knew nothing at all. Socrates would have made a good medical student. Chronic […]
Isobel Weinberg: The Foundation Programme Office giveth and it taketh away
On Monday, a friend posted a picture of an enormous, triple layered chocolate cake on Facebook. It was, she wrote, a present for her boyfriend—a final year medical student—to celebrate […]
Anna Allan: Training? What training?
The junior doctor’s applications process has metamorphosed from an individual interview process, to modernising medical careers (MMC), to the foundation programme application system. There has been a big push towards […]
Jonny Martell: What they don’t teach at medical school
Tomorrow I’ll go to work and among other things, prescribe drugs. I’ve been told that they work and that they’re mostly safe. There’s plenty to encourage me in believing this: […]
Lifebox Q and A: El Salvador—education, education, education
A pulse oximeter in the operating theatre doesn’t make surgery safer; it’s the anaesthesia provider using the oximeter effectively who will save lives. For Lifebox, the BMJ’s Christmas charity, provision […]
Geoffrey Roberts on using Lifebox pulse oximeters in Zambia
My wife and I arrived in Zambia in August 2012 for a six month placement as surgical registrars in a busy rural hospital in the Eastern Province. This was my […]
Lifebox Q and A: Togo—facing the facts and making a difference
When people talk about the crisis of unsafe anaesthesia worldwide, there’s one particular publication that is frequently referenced—it’s too shocking to ignore. “Deaths associated with anaesthesia in Togo, West Africa,” […]