Category: Blog Posts

Q. What do most want from life?

A. To be happy and successful.

Q. What should you do to achieve this?

A. Work hard, to achieve success, then feel happy.

 

The A-Level student knows they will be happy when they get into Medical School. The medical student will be happy when they graduate. The foundation doctor wants a good specialist training place. The specialist trainee will be happy when they complete training and find a permanent job. The GP/Consultant thinks they will be happy when they have saved enough money for early retirement….

Delayed gratification is certainly an essential part of the toolkit needed to achieve success. But, like me, you have probably learnt that there is more to actually being happy.

The obvious problem with the approach above is that happiness is all too often replaced by the next challenge. It is always in the future, when where we live is the present.

Evidence from the field of behavioural psychology suggests that this conventional wisdom about how to find happiness has even deeper flaws. And that the relationship between work, success and happiness is more complex than our instinctive, socially conditioned first thoughts might imply.

Shawn Achor, a Harvard Lecturer and psychologist, suggests in his book “The Happiness Advantage”, that the relationship between work, success and happiness actually runs in the opposite directions.

 

“People are smarter, more effective and resilient when they are happy”

Continue reading “Are NHS staff missing the Happiness Advantage?”

In the hope of providing some light relief, I sketched this whilst watching the diving last night.

Dubious quality but well intentioned.

Can you tell who inspired my athletes?

Are GP Federations the answer for General Practice?

This week’s sketch is inspired by the return of TNG to Netflix.

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While you are here, you might enjoy some of my recent posts…

 

 

 

 

 

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If you enjoyed my sketches or posts then please share on Twitter or Facebook and leave a comment!

 

You may have been noticing people acting rather strangely this week. Why are that couple walking on the patch of grass next to the Tesco that leads no where? Why are those teenagers hanging around outside the church next to the surgery? Are there more families walking around together in the sun? And why are they all holding mobile phones in their hands

Fortunately, it seems nearly everyone knows the answer. My 60 year old parents, my eight year old nephew, the practice manager and and the patients all know.

They are all playing Pokemon Go.

A new and addictive mobile game which has taken the world by storm. It is giving us all one of those rare shared cultural moments when everyone, young and old, have something in common to talk about.

“It is perhaps the first game to implement mixed reality”

 

Pokemon Go has had more active users than Twitter, and replaced “porn” as the most searched term on Google, this week.

A patient told me about Pokemon Go in clinic this Tuesday. “My autistic son wanted to get up and go out of the house. He never wants to do that.”

Interestingly, Pokemon Go is also receiving praise for having a positive impact on people’s mental and physical health.

 

So what is Pokemon Go and why am I excited?

Continue reading “Seven reasons a GP is excited about Pokemon Go?”

Sometimes you need to communicate a crucial point. To instruct individuals or a team to do something important. To encourage a trainee or team member to change a negative behaviour. It may be vitally important to a patient’s health or the success of your organisation. Fortunately medical training has prepared us well.

We know what to do. Present them with the facts. Support the message with data, graphs, risk ratios, tables and diagrams. This will help. Describe the options and the outcomes. Allow questions. Agree a course of action. Check understanding. Arrange to review progress.

People will then do what is best for themselves, society, or in the case of staff, the practice. Lose weight, complete the QOF prompts. They’ll be responsive to a logical case well made and do the right thing. Won’t they?

All too often, I find that, they don’t.

You will all recognise this story.

Tom is a smoker and we want to convince him to stop. We tell Tom that smoking kills 96,000 people a year in the UK, will shorten your life by an average of 10 years and that 80% of lung cancers are caused by smoking. The list of impacts and risks goes on. The logical case for stopping smoking is overwhelming. But, Tom had a friend… Bill. He smoked for 50 years and was fine. Until he stopped smoking. Since he stopped he had never coughed so much. He developed “heart trouble”, deteriorated and died. Bill always said that it was when he stopped smoking that his health started to go down hill.

“No doctor, I don’t want to stop smoking. It’s not worth the risk.”

Patients like Tom often show us the power of anecdotes and stories, and that they can be more compelling than the clearest of figures and facts.

It seems that many medics are missing a trick when communicating, motivating and leading. The use of stories and narrative are a great tool, and many professionals with technical and scientific backgrounds can under appreciate their impact.

Continue reading “How storytelling helped our CQC inspection”

Say what you see…

Wishing you a fun weekend!

While you’re here, maybe check out some of my other posts…