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Opinion

The digital panopticon, tentacles not included

Every time we examine ourselves for lumps, wonder how long  a mole has been there, or casually inspect the toilet bowl, we internalise this gaze, seeing ourselves through another’s eyes like inmates of the panopticon. We talk without irony about healthcare surveillance,
11 June 2026
5 mins read

Diving back in

So it took a few months to get back, agree to a few locums, then actually turn up and dive back in. Only then have I been able to decide how I still feel about medicine. And the answer has surprised me.
8 June 2026
2 mins read
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Don’t be a reverse centaur!

A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace ... many of the articles coming through BJGP Life extend this idea into medicine.
29 May 2026
4 mins read

The weight of ordinary things

What we lose when we lose the thinking space of the consultation is not administrative efficiency. It is a form of clinical knowledge that cannot be generated any other way: knowledge that emerges when a clinician holds the whole patient in mind
25 May 2026
2 mins read
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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
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Strange new lifeworlds

"When health care becomes overly focused on decontextualised or superficial goals, this world can be neglected or even forgotten, leaving us open to the risk of dehumanising research and practice ..."
1 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
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