Aint it always just the same…
…that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone!
Joni sums it up so well…
No, not the bit about giant multi-story car parks poking their ugly concrete facades above the pearly gates. Just the not knowing quite what you have until you lose it and find yourself wanting.
I guess this week has been something of a week of ethical crisis. The underlying principles of medical ethics are based on the tenets of non-maleficence, and beneficence. And I suppose my confidence in the capacity of doctors operating in the NHS to uphold those principles has been rather shaken this week.
Big dent in that confidence: I lost my first patient this weekend. I wont get technical here - not that the medical details matter much - except that you can’t help playing over and over the events and wondering if there was anything you could have done differently. In fact, they crashed and arrested after I had already left for the day, and the team on nights who dealt with it have assured me there is nothing I could have done differently that would have affected the outcome. But it doesn’t stop you wondering. Errare humanum est after all. But as Seneca rightly concluded, it is the persisting in error that is of the devil. And there seem to be so many of those persistently under-resourced and over stretched situations that make me wonder about the safety of patients under my care…
Joni sums it up so well…
No, not the bit about giant multi-story car parks poking their ugly concrete facades above the pearly gates. Just the not knowing quite what you have until you lose it and find yourself wanting.
I guess this week has been something of a week of ethical crisis. The underlying principles of medical ethics are based on the tenets of non-maleficence, and beneficence. And I suppose my confidence in the capacity of doctors operating in the NHS to uphold those principles has been rather shaken this week.
Big dent in that confidence: I lost my first patient this weekend. I wont get technical here - not that the medical details matter much - except that you can’t help playing over and over the events and wondering if there was anything you could have done differently. In fact, they crashed and arrested after I had already left for the day, and the team on nights who dealt with it have assured me there is nothing I could have done differently that would have affected the outcome. But it doesn’t stop you wondering. Errare humanum est after all. But as Seneca rightly concluded, it is the persisting in error that is of the devil. And there seem to be so many of those persistently under-resourced and over stretched situations that make me wonder about the safety of patients under my care…
posted by Duncan at 4:16 pm
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