Medical leadership

If you watch ER, House, Gray's Anatomy or any TV show where someone is periodically rushed into 'Emergency' you'll have noticed the handover conversation, maybe, in which the paramedics bark information at the medics as the gurney or trolley is run along the corridors.

There's a formula to these conversations. It was developed for obvious reasons - to convey maximum relevant information for action in minimal time and with minimal scope for confusion and omission.

From Tom Peters' blog post of July 25 2009 which you can read in full here

 Demos, a UK-based think tank, just published a booklet called 'The Talking Cure'. Here's how Demos describes it (The 'NHS' is the UK's National Health Service):

Attached is a pdf with some thoughts in from a series of four pieces written for the British Journal of Healthcare Management. Hope you find some useful ideas in it. Here's the front page abstract:

REDISCOVERING LOST VALUES
Professor Aidan Halligan, director of Elision Health
A series of four articles on the theme of rediscovering lost values in
healthcare, published in the British Journal of Healthcare
Management 2007 Vol 13 Nos. 8-12

From Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking:

"Recently the medical researcher Wendy Levinson recorded hundreds of conversations between a group of physicians and their patients. Roughly half of the doctors had never been sued. The other half had been sued at least twice, and Levinson found that just on the basis of those conversations, she could find clear differences between the two groups.