Duncan McGregor

Pulmonary Artery Shove And Hope For The Best Catheter doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though does it?

I think you’re right that it requires imagination, but by necessity if you are aiming for those higher rungs of Bloom’s (which I agree with) that is going to require investment. Question writing and validation costs money, and as I said before, novel questions cost more.

I don’t have the answers, but I do know that one of the major issues is going to be the fact that doing the job better will require a significant degree of investment.
But I honestly think that we should be more embarrassed by how useless the primary is vs how good it could actually be.

I suppose that the challenge is that there is increasing complexity of practice and a ‘many ways to skin a cat’ nature of anaesthesia alongside the fact that exams often need a clear objective answer. These two issues clearly do not neatly align into high quality examinations.

A college exam question writer once explained that they love calculation questions or questions about certain numerical values as it is very easy/quick (read cheap) to write one question base that can be made in to multiple different questions for the question bank.

I think that there is clearly a role for postgraduate exams, not least because of international precedent and a desire to hold on to international esteem.
I just think that it requires bold/courageous curriculum overhaul investment in exam design.

Unconvinced that there is much precedence in any other sector for providing the kind of full time postgraduate education that you are describing. I would suggest that somewhere in between current practice and what you describe would be a reasonable expectation.

…when she had needed to know how a horse hair hygrometer works in her consultant career.

…demonstrate vast knowledge of fairly clinically useless minutiae.
That isn’t to say that all content needs to be clinical, but there needs to be /relevance/.
Recall a consultant once saying something along the lines of “these things do come up in your career eventually” and I asked…

I completely agree that the syllabus needs modernising and aligning with useful content, and there is definitely a hidden curriculum of what the college “likes to ask about” which is deeply problematic in and of itself.
We can maintain high standards without expecting candidates to…

The point about the exams having no defined purpose struck me also - a very robust critique that I have not seen any inspiring defence against
Very much supports the rhetoric that the exams were made to be so tediously difficult that surgeons wouldn’t want to sit them when the college split with RCS

So I actually did read the commissioned report when it was released - prompting a consultant I was discussing it with enquiring if I was an ICU-inclined anaesthetist because “reading reports cover to cover is a very intensivist thing to do”

Me showing off my shiny new kitchen and cooking for friends while there are still patches of bare plaster all over the rest of my downstairs

👀
I’m starting you on it

Tell that to the college curriculum which I’m fairly sure still defines RSI strictly as thio/sux

I think it’s better to imagine the RSI as the Ship of Theseus.
None of the components are the same any more, the name stubbornly remains unchanged and discussing the meaning of it is only really interesting to the inanely academic.

I bet they have great pockets 😔

Just the one, but yes none of those peasant scrubs up here

I’m yet to be pulled up on my lanyard which is around my neck holding a badge which is clipped to the scrub top pocket.
No infection control argument if there’s no dangling

Picture of a roast dinner set at a table with a dog looking on hungrily

First roast cooked in the new kitchen after renovations.
A modest spread but that gravy was fucking A

Vagus nerve is also pretty important. If not functioning correctly could contribute to general malaise.

Only just heard my first Christmas song, which is not bad going I reckon.

To the *recently bereaved*

A humiliation kink too?
Oh Christopher you are full of little surprises

Whatever you need to tell yourself…
Well, you have my details 😘

I never took you for this kind of kink. Colour me impressed

“Accidentally”

Just incredible

It’s giving Final Fantasy meets Elden Ring.
Looks sick. Definitely going on the wishlist!

Not my usual style but I’ll give it a look

Interesting, I’ll have a look. I had overlooked it as nothing really grabbed my attention about it