By Dr Joseph Hawkins, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Clinical lead for End of Life Care, Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Foundation Trust. Twitter: @JoeHawk75825077
Reporting for The Palliative Times,
Our guest reporter Dr Oje Snawkih writes:
The new advert for palliative medicine trainees has been a huge success. This follows a dramatic fall in training applications and would appear to be a much needed windfall for the embattled specialty.
The tag line ‘Be Complex, Be Palliative’: uttered by a silhouette of a model with their head tipped to one side has become a strident call for arms to all prospective palliative care trainees.
Originally devised by international man of palliative care mystery Lilt E Moonn, the catchphrase is said to capture the essence of what it means to work in palliative care. Here it was summed up by Lilt:
‘it’s a phrase that sounds good to the linguistically inclined but important doesn’t mean very much. It asks questions-is palliative care complex or are the practitioners of palliative medicine complex?’
‘What even is complexity’, he added rhetorically.
True to style Lilt then muttered something in Latin and hung up the telephone.
Whatever the truth behind the tag line, whether it is a brilliant word salad that encapsulates the indefinable essence of a specialty or simply an intriguing phrase, there is no doubt that palliative medicine training numbers are too low and competition ratios have never been lower. Anything that can improve this would appear to be a miracle in a specialty that desperately needs some future care planning.
Palliative medicine is struggling. There is no longer the offered opioid of a specialty that sits outside of acute medical registrar shifts. It would appear that the pain is too great for those most suited to palliative medicine training to want to continue. Perhaps the future won’t be fixed by a catchphrase. However, one thing that seems certain is that the current shape of training is putting off trainees and the prognosis may be bleak if we don’t rectify this.
Also by this Author:
The well
The rock and the crime.
My Tower. Your heart.