Bedside Reading Bedside Reading Podcast

A warm welcome today to Ben Allen, a GP from Sheffield who is here to talk to me about Amy Edmondson's second book The Right Kind of Wrong which is all about celebrating and learning from failure. Failure is something that health care professionals are not particularly good at.  It's something that we are so often afraid of. So frequently people talk about airline safety and the lessons that can be learned from aviation and those that can be translated into health care and then we wonder why aren't we doing this? What's holding us back? What do we need to know to do this better?

It's such an accessible and really good book and I love Amy Edmondson anyway so it was really interesting talking to Ben who has really embraced the idea of "Intelligent failure" in trying new new things,  not being afraid to try and to fail and always to see life as a learning experience. It was a delight to talk to him. It's a great book and I really hope you're going to enjoy listening.

Follow Ben on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/BenAllenGP

As many regular listeners may know I absolutely love talking to authors about their books, especially healthcare professional authors and today is one of those episodes.

I am so delighted to welcome Leah Hazard to the podcast to talk about her book Womb: the inside story of where we all began which is a phenomenal book literally for anybody. If only we could get this book into the PHSE curriculum for all young people,  if only we could get all adults to read it. It is phenomenally accessible. It is scientifically so accurate and so brilliant. 

Follow Leah on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/hazard_leah or on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/leahhazard

It's a joy today to welcome back Kirsty Shires to Bedside Reading. Kirsty and I first connected last year over Michael Rosen's Many Different Kinds of Love and she emailed me a few weeks ago to tell me about a book that she thought I ought to read which actually I had read before many years ago!  I've absolutely loved coming back to it.  Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down  is the story of a Hmong refugee family and their daughter Lia set in California in the early nineties and some of the culture clash and culture shock that exists between their understanding of their daughter's condition, epilepsy, which in their language means "the spirit catches you and you fall down" and her American doctors. It is a phenomenal read. It was wonderful to talk to Kirsty today about some of the themes from it and what we've both learned and what we've changed in our practice as a result of having read it.

One of the really big practice changing aspects for us both was discovering Arthur Klienman's eight questions which Kirsty decribes as "like ICE on steroids" and which make a HUGE difference in practice when used appropriately:
 https://thinkculturalhealth.hhs.gov/assets/pdfs/resource-library/arthur-kleinmans-eight-questions.pdf

Kirsty also recommended A Smell of Burning  by Colin Grant
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/19/a-smell-of-burning-the-story-of-epilepsy-colin-grant-review

 I'm delighted to welcome Ellen Welch, GP and writer to today's epsiode of Bedside Reading. Ellen's book Why Can't I see my GP: the past present and future of General Practice came out in February this year and feels such a topical read with everything that's been going on at the moment with the GP contract referendum.  If you are a GP you might well enjoy it, recognise a lot of it and then hand it on to family and friends. But if you don't really understand how primary care works if you don't know why GPs always seem to be moaning about something as we are so frequently accused if you want to understand the health service better I would absolutely recommend it. It's quite a small book. It's very very accessible. And it's certainly one that I'm going to be recommending to medical students and to new GP registrars to give them a bit more context about the system in which they're training and working.

A warm welcome today to Alan Shirley GP and Medical Educator to talk about A Fortunate Man: The story of a country doctor. The seminal John Berger and Jean Mohr book which has to a certain extent stood the test of time and has very much been the classic book mentioned when people talk about medical humanities or about books that relate to GP training.

It's not a book just for GPs though and and I really enjoyed my conversation with Alan about the elements of this book that are problematic as well as the elements which have stood the test of time and also how beautifully it sits with Polly Morland's more recent book A Fortunate Woman.

Alan and I mention a number of models/theories of the consultation and if you want to know more or have forgotten what you once knew this is a great overview https://www.essentialgptrainingbook.com/wp-content/online-resources/04%20consultation%20models.pdf

We mentioned Darren Garvey's superb book Poverty Safari  as well as Bridget Christie's comedy series "The Change" which is available on Channel 4.

As ever if you want to buy books I'd always recommend an independent bookshop, my favourite is Scarthin in Cromford and they are amazing online/by phone too:  https://scarthinbooksonline.com/

Dr Lucy Pollock's The Book About Getting Older has got to be one of the most compassionate, wise and useful books I have read. It was a delight to be joined by Lauren Wallis, a GPST2 who has moved from being a gynaecologist with a single system focus to a most excellent generalist with a newfound enthusiasm for frailty.