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BJGP Life

BJGP Life

The BJGP is the world-leading primary care journal. At BJGP Life we add multi-media comment and opinion for the primary care community.

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The dilemma of GP triage: a poem with reflection

We are keepers of patients’ stories and often we cannot help but open the Pandora’s box : who has written this – was it a relative, an obliging receptionist or a tech savvy grandchild? Why have they used those words, what does
7 May 2026
2 mins read

Book review: Gloria Don’t Speak

"This book gives Gloria a voice. It needs to be read widely by anyone involved in the care of people with learning disability or neurodiversity." - Peter Lindsay reviews Gloria Don't Speak by Lucy Apps
2 May 2026
3 mins read

The myth of the autonomous clinician

We work through constant interaction with patients, reception staff, nurses, colleagues, and managers. Moral agency is not exercised in isolation but through negotiation, shared responsibility, and emotional labour. Ethical models that ignore this fail to describe the world in which general practice
29 April 2026
3 mins read

Speaking power to suffering

...there is a language barrier between the specialist, who thinks in terms of technical problems and how to solve them, and the lay person, who is more concerned with their own experience and how to make sense of it. Anyone working in
23 April 2026
4 mins read

The surgery that thinks

General practice is not a solo cognitive act but a distributed system of people, tools, and spaces thinking together. Safety and fairness depend less on individual reasoning than on how this network aligns.
20 April 2026
3 mins read

Thresholds

The consultation ends. The next one has not yet begun. In between, there are a few seconds. These are thresholds. We rarely notice them. We probably should.
17 April 2026
1 min read

The first clinical decision of the day

"The phones start ringing before the shutters are fully up. On line three, a woman tries to sound calm but keeps losing her breath mid-sentence. The receptionist tilts their head, listening more to the rhythm than the words. Something isn’t right. The
15 April 2026
3 mins read

Doing it right, and doing it well

For us, perfection is not just an unachievable goal, but a false one, and perfectionism can never, even under ideal conditions, deliver the validation it promises us. Ben Hoban tackles perfectionism.
14 April 2026
4 mins read

Barriers and boundaries

Boundaries in medical care are therefore not primarily a mechanism for creating distance between people, but for making safe the closeness that effective care requires - not just the line separating one entity from another, but also the point of contact between
3 April 2026
5 mins read

Small acts. Deep knowing

Presence is not a soft skill. It is the core technology of general practice. In a world of algorithms and assembly lines, our most powerful clinical instrument remains our capacity to know our patients as human beings.
1 April 2026
4 mins read

Medicine’s caste system of the mind

"Both patients had the same symptoms and required the same care. However, one mind made the work smooth; the other made it onerous. Without malice or awareness, the GP sorted them into different moral categories: the organised mind that deserves time, and
25 March 2026
4 mins read
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