This collection of stories from two practising GPs describes the reality of working within a failing and highly bureaucratic system, where there is a balancing act: regulation versus relationships; autonomy versus standard practice; algorithm versus individual attention.We aren’t suggesting a return to a ‘better’ time. We don’t object to being bureaucrats, embedded within and accountable to the systems we are in. But we do want to consider how and with what the gap left by the old-...

There is a subtle magic in fleeting encounters that brush against the fabric of our lives - the stranger on a train who reminds you that life is short, a country walk that evokes long-buried childhood moments, a fragment of ancient ceramic that takes you back two hundred years, a chicken flapping its wings in a forest, a strain of music that answers a question, tango dancers late at night in a street far from home.In forty-three brilliantly vivid, poignant, funny, nuanced vignettes...

This pioneering book illustrates the ways in which an interpretive or hermeneutic stance can be incorporated into modern healthcare across clinical practice, clinical ethics, education and leadership – and the transformative effects of doing so.Combining practical case studies and narrative, this book introduces the hermeneutic window, in which meaning making frames clinical and educational decision making. It shows how best practice requires more than clinical knowledge, communica...