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Opinion - Page 3

The acceptable stimulant

"One morning, while happily sipping my aromatic coffee, a colleague looked over and remarked, 'You do drink a lot of coffee'. I dismissed the comment immediately. 'Surely not,' I thought, 'I'm well within the recommended daily caffeine intake.' Or was I?"
3 September 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

Time is the physics of care

"Time is not simply a tool for scheduling health care; it is the very medium through which care’s quality, safety, and justice are realised. It compresses attention, creates inertia, imposes thresholds, and dissipates energy. If we want to understand why care sometimes
18 March 2026
3 mins read

Fine. Thanks.

What if we were to let the patient into our own inner world; of battling against the clock, the relentless stacking up of admin that occurs in real time as the consultation progresses ... the lack of time in our relationships at
11 March 2026
2 mins read

I’m a GP — do you still trust me?

Trust is not visible, but you miss it when you lose it. Trust develops from many inputs that include memories, beliefs, and emotions that help us predict how someone may act.
7 March 2026
4 mins read
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