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Stories

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"I’m getting too old for this. Every year it’s the same: I tell them I’m retiring, and everyone’s upbeat and all end-of-an-era and don’t-you-worry-we’ll-be-fine; then a week before Christmas, the emails start coming in, and they’re not fine, and it’s all a
3 December 2025
3 mins read
1
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I have a stammer

I still have days where I come out of my clinic into the waiting and turn back around because the patient’s name is stuck in my throat and I need a minute to compose myself. But that’s my journey. I don’t choose
21 November 2025
5 mins read
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Making Mosaics

I have learned something crucial about the experience of being listened to and been able to talk about and reflect on the patients I find hardest to care for.
14 November 2025
7 mins read
1

Mind the gap

"There was a collective sigh, and a silence as everyone contemplated once again the gap between the good idea and its implementation."
10 November 2025
2 mins read
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The value of time

How often have you exclaimed that you ‘wish there were more hours in the day’, lamented where the ‘day has gone’, or complained about how some activity has ‘robbed you of time’ you will ‘never get back’. ...time... has value and worth.
29 October 2025
4 mins read
3
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Getting back in the fight

'It’s just that you’ve been here for a while already and as you say, we’ve covered several things, and I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed by your list of problems.' A consultation through the allegorical lens of science fiction battle armour!
13 September 2025
3 mins read
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Space-Dreaming in Lambeth

To commemorate 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge,' (3rd September 1802), Dave Mummery shares a Lambeth reverie with suggestions for musical accompaniment.
3 September 2025
4 mins read
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How to use a stethoscope

Listen. Through me, you’ll hear the lub-dub of a beating heart, the heave of a heavy spirit, whisperings and murmurs of a broken life. Poetry by Emer Forde
19 August 2025
1 min read
2
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Home is where the heart is?

I'd spoken to so many residents on the phone but I hadn't ever quite got the picture of what the living conditions were like. I did now. The poor chests that never truly recovered from antibiotics, the perennial mental health difficulties -
16 August 2025
4 mins read
2
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A poem: Heart failure.

Using a narrative based approach can also enrich our own perspective and give us boldness to hold back from encasing patients in the tight algorithms that chronic disease management is often associated with. Becca Quinn offers a reframing poem.
16 July 2025
1 min read
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I knew her smile…

A knock on the door. First patient of the day. “Hello… come in,” I say. I didn’t recognise the name, But I knew her smile. A poem by Rahhiel Riasat
26 June 2025
2 mins read
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Delete after reading

All advice under Emergency Health Regulations is in line with current evidence and best practice and is therefore in your best interests. Acting against your own best interests is ... therefore prohibited. A Hoban dystopia.
6 June 2025
2 mins read
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The Clock Ticks Differently Now

We competed not for praise, but for endurance. For the longest call. The bloodiest shift. The boldest procedure. A hundred hours a week? A badge of honour. In those halls, medicine was not a career. It was a covenant. Poem by Anuj
5 June 2025
1 min read
5
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Clinical courage

Clinical courage is a term that has emerged in the field of rural general practice, particularly in Canada and Australia. Caroline McCarthy reflects on how it manifested for her.
8 May 2025
3 mins read
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The days of small things

...I sensed that they also lived in a different dimension of time. The soft chattering of the patients waiting and sitting on the grass outside the clinic had an unhurried acceptance of just waiting. Storied reflection from rural general practice in South
5 May 2025
5 mins read
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Fight or Flight

‘Trauma is patient, doc, if it's one thing I've learnt.’ His pale green eyes fix on mine dark pupils with an infinity of space. A poem by Giles Dawnay
10 April 2025
1 min read
2
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Getting an upgrade

Taking a look at her consultation model feels like the least painful of her goals to try and get done, and so she takes hold of the flaking metal handrail, slowly breathes in and out to centre herself, and walks down the
3 April 2025
4 mins read
2
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Narrative failure

Something shifted in my head, and I heard the sound of a penny dropping in a bank vault deep underground. I rummaged around in my desk for the Campbell-Frank Analyser and applied the scalp electrodes and mask with trembling hands.
10 March 2025
4 mins read
1
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Narrative medicine

A means by which participants can make some sense of their threads... And nurse the ends of their unravelled stories. The healing ...Is in the weaving.
21 January 2025
1 min read
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Kez and the system

Kez has an embarrassing problem. He has tried a cream that maybe worked in the past but not now. He needs the doctor, he thinks. He rings the surgery...
30 December 2024
2 mins read
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Overcoming the Monster

How we understand our story makes a difference to how we go about the job, how effectively we do it, and how it leaves us feeling when we go home... One of these proto-narratives is especially relevant to us as doctors: Overcoming
17 December 2024
3 mins read
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Crab Apples

Giles Dawnay captures the transition of autumn to winter in a poem about cancer.
16 December 2024
1 min read
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A brief vulnerability

"For the first time for many years I felt that I had lost control. Suddenly my comfortable Western privilege wasn’t working. I felt stranded, helpless, a powerless fragment of a distressed and angry crowd."
2 December 2024
3 mins read
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Making it look easy

...none of this stuff is difficult if you keep in shape and know what you’re doing ... Bosco felt like she had been running her whole life, one way or another, and you might just as well have asked her to stop
22 November 2024
4 mins read
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