Getting it Wrong
I enjoy documentaries, even those strange ones on Channel Five that repeat everything every thirty seconds for the hard of understanding:
Chantelle, who has lived on nothing but Kit-Kats for the last thirty years, arrives at the Karl Marx Clinic in Texas to meet Dr Reginald Battenburg, in the hope that he will cure her of her addiction - -
But, in general, if it's a BBC documentary, I tend to assume that the facts in it will be more or less correct.
Then my brother sent me this link to a Radio 4 documentary about something I can claim to know a lot about.
The Simulated Patient
Documentary looking at an unusual aspect of medical training. Medical schools hire actors to play the roles of patients in order to allow trainee doctors to practise the art of breaking bad news. Some older doctors are sceptical about the value of such education.
I haven't listened to the documentary yet because I am too busy wanting to kill whoever wrote the trashy blurb, above.
So here are the errors and half-truths: because I know the facts!
1) It isn't an unusual aspect of medical training at all. All medical schools use simulated patients. It was unusual when I started working as a simulated patient. That was in 1985, which is quite a while ago now.
2) Medical schools hire actors - - well, sometimes simulated patients are actors. And sometimes they're not. Many come from other backgrounds. Some actors make brilliant simulated patients - other actors are too full of "look at ME!" to be any use as a learning resource.
3) in order for trainee doctors to practise the art of breaking bad news - well, yes. And for many other things too - such as explaining medical procedures, and what's called "taking a history" of the patient's illness, and to practise arriving at a joint decision with the patient with regard to their treatment, and for assessment in examinations, to name but a few.
4) Some older doctors are sceptical about the value of such education.
This line infuriates me, because, as the final line of the Trashy Blurb, with its patronising use of "such education" it seems to suspect that they might be right.
And they're not. "Some older doctors" are closed-minded, supercilious gits, so sod them. Every other doctor - including many older doctors - can see the value of this kind of work.
Work with simulated patients can - and should - seem totally real, even though the learners know that it isn't. There is absolutely no substitute for practising the actual words that you might say. Doctors who don't are liable to make those "Oh, sorry, didn't you know it was cancer?" statements.
It does make me wonder. When I read the blurb for a documentary about, say, the avocado-growers of Venezuela, I wonder how many factual errors there are? And that's before we've started watching the actual documentary itself.
Chantelle, who has lived on nothing but Kit-Kats for the last thirty years, arrives at the Karl Marx Clinic in Texas to meet Dr Reginald Battenburg, in the hope that he will cure her of her addiction - -
But, in general, if it's a BBC documentary, I tend to assume that the facts in it will be more or less correct.
Then my brother sent me this link to a Radio 4 documentary about something I can claim to know a lot about.
The Simulated Patient
Documentary looking at an unusual aspect of medical training. Medical schools hire actors to play the roles of patients in order to allow trainee doctors to practise the art of breaking bad news. Some older doctors are sceptical about the value of such education.
I haven't listened to the documentary yet because I am too busy wanting to kill whoever wrote the trashy blurb, above.
So here are the errors and half-truths: because I know the facts!
1) It isn't an unusual aspect of medical training at all. All medical schools use simulated patients. It was unusual when I started working as a simulated patient. That was in 1985, which is quite a while ago now.
2) Medical schools hire actors - - well, sometimes simulated patients are actors. And sometimes they're not. Many come from other backgrounds. Some actors make brilliant simulated patients - other actors are too full of "look at ME!" to be any use as a learning resource.
3) in order for trainee doctors to practise the art of breaking bad news - well, yes. And for many other things too - such as explaining medical procedures, and what's called "taking a history" of the patient's illness, and to practise arriving at a joint decision with the patient with regard to their treatment, and for assessment in examinations, to name but a few.
4) Some older doctors are sceptical about the value of such education.
This line infuriates me, because, as the final line of the Trashy Blurb, with its patronising use of "such education" it seems to suspect that they might be right.
And they're not. "Some older doctors" are closed-minded, supercilious gits, so sod them. Every other doctor - including many older doctors - can see the value of this kind of work.
Work with simulated patients can - and should - seem totally real, even though the learners know that it isn't. There is absolutely no substitute for practising the actual words that you might say. Doctors who don't are liable to make those "Oh, sorry, didn't you know it was cancer?" statements.
It does make me wonder. When I read the blurb for a documentary about, say, the avocado-growers of Venezuela, I wonder how many factual errors there are? And that's before we've started watching the actual documentary itself.
posted by Daphne at 9:39 pm
4 Comments:
"unusual" is frequently used to mean "unexpected" - ie "unexpected by the ignoramus using it"
Julie paradox
Hopefully you found that the documentary itself didn't live down to the Trashy Blurb. I was one of the students involved in it, and when I first read the Trashy Blurb on the RT website, I wondered if they were talking about some entirely different show.
- Beth, medical student, Glasgow University
Ah, thank you Julie - and Beth, thank you too, that's excellent, I will listen to it now without having fear of rising blood pressure!
It's like headlines, innit?
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