“Thanks team, sleep well” you say at handover, to the exhausted-looking night shift before they head home to bed. Of course you’re grateful to your team mates who have held the fort overnight, providing care to patients when the rest of the team are at home, tucked up in bed. They deserve every bit of recognition and gratitude they get because what they do is truly amazing. But what about all the other opportunities to thank our colleagues? Why don’t we say “thank you” more o

The embedding of incident reporting in our safety culture in emergency medicine has been a bedrock underpinning our culture of improvement and governance in recent years. We are nearly all familiar with the busy shift, when something didn't go the way we wanted for our patient and the words "I'm going to DATix that" are uttered. Ideally not as a tool for punishment, but genuinely because we feel (and hope) that this system might flag the problem in a systematic way and potent

An exciting day today for UK medicine and wellness as we finally put 'pen to paper' about the importance of Wellness in our programme You Got This. We must do a better job of looking after our staff and each other if we are going to sustain people in (emergency) medicine and the amazing care they provide to patients. And so here begins our journey to provide the resources, the activities, the community of support and the platform to better care for the physical, mental, spiri

This month we are piloting a 'You Got This' welcome programme for new staff starting in our department. The idea is simple. When you start working with us, we will send you a little something through the post with a card. We basically want to say "Welcome. We are looking forward to meeting you. We are excited about working with you." Do we need to do this? Does it matter? There are, of course, lots of ways of welcoming people to a new job and this is just one. The key point i

There is a little whiff of Spring in the air but the long days, dark mornings and pressures facing many in emergency departments have left many feeling tired and even exhausted. What can this tiredness do? Well it can certainly affect our physical and mental health but it can even affect our ability to be caring and compassionate. I once heard a colleague say "I don't know how it happened, but I'm not sure that I care enough any more." One of the saddest things I have heard a