Tag Archives: Healthcare

What is understood. Understood. Standing under. Capisce?

The humans built the tower to reach heaven or God and their punishment to forever live in perplexity, to hover above or alongside the dark matter.

Innovation, oranges and the impossibility of happiness (Monday imaginings)

…the shape of hills, the movement of water, muscles and the eye, the mechanism of the woodpecker’s tongue, the development of the foetus, creation, innovation, perspective and momentum.

Bob Ross, Happy and Unhappy accidents (healthcare and filler-TV)

I brought-up Bob when explaining to my colleagues the meaning of ‘happy accident’ – I was being flippant although the context was not.

If I told you I’m good, you would probably say I’m boasting & Teamworking

We want to be associated with the best – the best team, country, organisation.

Others don’t really care.

Some see the whole of the moon.

Others Brigadoon.

How long until I die? (Locked down and out in 2020)

Often old men and women will seek human contact, particularly when feeling isolated – and when I reciprocate with my gloved hand (that they don’t appear to notice as being anomalously purple or blue) we are able to make contact, to connect.

Jean Bishop (*warning – graphic images!)

Hard work, when translated into a vision that makes a significant difference is itself transformed, it becomes meaning, its return on investment is not necessarily financial, it is something more profound and longer-lasting.

Blogs, Poems, etc 2017

Rod’s Blogs, Poems, etc.  Table of Contents I search for meaning. 6 ‘Behavioural’ 8 10 Years. 10 10 years. 11 99+. 13 1559 days. 15 A response to Henry. 17 A tale of two times?. 18 Acute. 20 Advance Care Plan, Human Rights & I want what I want 23 alea iacta est 25 AllContinue reading “Blogs, Poems, etc 2017”

Visiting times

I am sure I have written about this before, in relation to my thoughts about the whole visiting times situation in the UK. Thanks to the work of John’s Campaign, the status quo is being eroded and the wards are being unlocked. For me, I return to questioning where my passion for this came-from; IContinue reading “Visiting times”

Night at the hospital

There is an assumption that when the lights go down and the night-staff appear on the scene that things become quiet and still – a little like a scene from Bambi.

Person-centred

Could you Facetime your doctor when you are on holiday in Greece rather than having to wade through the complexities of health insurance (yes, Brexiters) and a foreign health system?

Stop!  

She survived. She could have died – I never asked the question.

1328 and some

‘Did my dad die because someone didn’t follow policy, didn’t pay attention or, was the outcome inevitable?’ ‘Might my mum have survived the operation if she had a different surgeon or she was at a different hospital?’

Unnatural selection

You are unconscious, the focus for the doctors and nurses is maintaining your physiology with particular attention to your brain and heart.

Medicines, etc.

Nevertheless, within the dark underbelly of medicine, where geriatricians live, there are some quite stunning effects often, from stopping and sometimes starting medicines.

Isomers, CRP and diet

The concept of a ‘reassurance scan’ is particularly treacherous, for often, odd abnormalities are discovered – with such frequency in medicine that they even have their own name… ‘Incidentalomas’

The Interceptors

The point, as is often the case, is my aversion to patients. Or rather, the existential construct that relates to the ‘patient state’ = they who suffer; with the principal goal of my life being to obviate suffering, my objective is to really stop people turning into patients.

And that is the role of the interceptors.

Complex Adaptive Systems, Steppenwolf & Siddhartha

The essence of this is not to not do nothing, but, when we act, whether that act is big – going to war, or small, deciding to smile, there is a likelihood that the effects will reverberate far into time and space.

What is dementia?

Whether we follow the Japanese and find a new name, or work to continue to change attitudes and behaviours, steering people away from the stigma currently associated with dementia is unclear – it is certainly the bogeyman that TB, cancer and HIV once were, we just need to work towards finding better solutions and ways to support people until we find a way out.

You don’t have ‘x’

  You don’t have ‘x’ – this can be good news for some, for others it doesn’t really help… Let me explain. If a person feels ill or has a specific symptom – (the easier ones tend to be breathlessness, chest pain or cough), there are a fairly standard set of tests or investigations whichContinue reading “You don’t have ‘x’”

Patients in pyjamas

Patients in pyjamas – it might sound a little flippant, but I think this is something that is very important. I cannot comment on the behaviours of other patients outside of the UK – we, in Britain, approach hospital attire in a special way; pyjamas. I don’t know when pyjamas began in hospital – whether backContinue reading “Patients in pyjamas”

Human Factors, space-time and Yiddishkeit

On Friday I attended the Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Collaborative ‘One Year On’ conference. A number of speakers from the region discussed the work they are doing to make predominantly hospitals, but all care in the wider sense, safer, less likely to result in inadvertent harm. Primum non nocere – first, do no harm,Continue reading “Human Factors, space-time and Yiddishkeit”

There is a strange aesthetic associated with care

If you go to an art gallery, whether the National Portrait in London or your local museum, where paintings are displayed, there is something mesmerising about the human face; when an artist captures the moment of silence, of stillness or of movement, when the years are brought into focus and a person is seen as aContinue reading “There is a strange aesthetic associated with care”

Tigers, Scotsmen, and hospitals

Last night I watched a re-run of ‘Lost Land of the Tiger’ – this is a nature documentary with Steve Backshall, Scottish Wildlife Cameraman Gordon Buchanan, Scottish Entomologist George McGavin and others wandering about the highlands and lowlands of Bhutan in search of evidence of tigers. The programme focuses on the creation of a ‘tigerContinue reading “Tigers, Scotsmen, and hospitals”