For GPs: Why new year is the best time to roll out any new intervention or promote health messages for your patients
For patients: Why using the new year as motivation can help shape a new you by creating powerful new habits
Read on for more 🧵 👇
The onset of a new year is something called a ‘Temporal Landmark’ 🧠 🗺️ . Other such landmarks can be birthdays, anniversaries or the start of a month.
These are moments of time we can look at that signify ways to start from zero.
Dec 23, 2022 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Patient Education Series 👨🏫
When your chest infection is not a chest infection 🫁
Read on for some information that should help you 🧵👇
One of the commonest misconceptions we come across as GPs is when a patient thinks they need antibiotics for a normal viral upper respiratory tract illness.
Dec 21, 2022 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
About to start a shift in Urgent Care once again. With the ambulance strikes (solidarity with them) I suspect chaos for us. We normally get 15-20 ambulances a shift to transfer patients to the main a&e in our locality for those that present here unwell.
The local hospital has no standard operating procedure for what we are meant to do (v frustrating) so we are in effect flying blind today and are having to decide on the fly what to do with those that need transfer to a&e that would normally need an ambulance.
Dec 20, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Was working in urgent care last night.
The only Dr on. 7 hour wait. A chilling scream from the waiting room - a woman pulled up outside and a young man was limp in the drivers seat. Cardiac arrest.
As we were working on him frantically in the car park, 2 individuals from the waiting room asked to go out ‘for a fag’. The receptionist told them there was a serious incident outside and they should show some restraint and wait.
Dec 5, 2022 • 16 tweets • 10 min read
🚨It’s that time of the week again 😎
Here’s a roundup of the latest Primary Care news 🗞️
We should always start from the ideal position and work towards making that attainable.
At the present moment in time there are three limiting factors:
-Funding
-Expertise on developing healthcare systems
-Consensus on transforming care
Let’s walk through it 👇
Dec 2, 2022 • 27 tweets • 7 min read
I saw a patient on a home visit that highlighted all of the problems within the NHS in a nutshell 🌰 👇
A frail and multimorbid patient had deteriorated slowly over months then rapidly within the space of 1 month.
She was diagnosed with Cor Pulmonale in a 5 week hospital stay, on a background of months of shortness of breath that we had investigated with our normal pathways.
Nov 26, 2022 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
Feeling hungry all the time? Here’s how hunger works and some hacks you can use to curb that craving 🧵👇
There are multiple neural pathways involved in hunger, involving the hypothalamus which secretes at least 2 hormones that stimulate hunger and at least 2 hormones that inhibit it.
Nov 25, 2022 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
Reframing the way you think about work. See below for some very interesting ideas🧵 👇
In“Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?” Sophie Leroy, a Business Professor, studied the phenomenon of switching between tasks. She found attention stays attached to the 1st activity, which means we can only half-focus on the 2nd, which hurts our performance.
Nov 24, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Agreed. There has been a dramatic shift in health needs due to changing expectations and the digitisation of information for health. With almost everyone owning a smartphone everyone has access to knowledge with very little friction.
What this means is that people can access information at the touch of a button. In theory this is great. However for healthcare workers it poses a few problems.
Nov 24, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
GPs representatives have voted to cut core hours from 9am-5pm from the existing agreed core hours of 8am-6.30pm. pulsetoday.co.uk/news/breaking-…
Here’s my take on this. When you look at studies of productivity and work performance, working longer hours is associated with the following: Decreased productivity, poor performance, health related problems and lower motivation. The health problems disproportionately impact..
Nov 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Hi 👋 I’m The Secret Doctor, and from today I’m going to be posting content from the perspective of a working doctor. I work as a GP, and my motivation for doing this is to share with you, the general public, what it’s really like behind the curtain.
Now, more than ever, it’s important for everyone to understand the facts and not get caught up in any narrative driven agenda. It’s an unfortunate shame that many patients and people are being left frustrated by being unable to access their doctor, but what’s worse still is..
