This is the first in a new series on the working lives of medical professionals. Please email any suggestions or comments to jrsmeditorial@rsm.ac.uk for the attention of Manoj Ramachandran, associate editor, JRSM
1. Please outline your typical working day
Rise at 6am. Check email, deal with non-core tasks (e.g. referee a paper) and/or do some online teaching (I run a ‘virtual’ MSc course). If no early meetings, one-hour gym session on way to work. Mornings typically consist of meetings, e.g. supervising BSc or PhD students, a committee, a team meeting for one of my seven research projects, et cetera. Afternoon is desk work – typically marking essays, examining PhDs or various writing tasks (papers, grant applications, course materials, strategy documents). Sometimes I do field work – interviewing or observing various healthcare projects. I am evaluating a couple of high-profile projects in the National Programme for IT, so at least once a week I'm at the offices of Connecting for Health or the Department of Health. I also manage 17 staff so team-building and troubleshooting human resource issues take up a fair chunk of time. I leave the office fairly early (about 4pm on a good day) to miss the worst of the traffic, but I always take work home. The ‘working day’ ends at the kitchen table with a cup of tea tying up the day's loose ends. I never go to bed without answering all the day's emails (usually around 100 messages). Once or twice a week I do a surgery at the GP practice where I'm an assistant.
2. One aspect of work you most look forward to each day
Figure 1.
Trisha Greenhalgh
Teaching on our online MSc in International Primary Health Care; we currently have 58 students from 18 countries who share their experiences in interactive virtual seminars. I've learnt more from these students than from any textbook and have been humbled by their passion to improve quality in what are often staggeringly difficult circumstances.
3. One aspect of work you least look forward to each day
Filling out badly-designed forms.
4. A person who has inspired you most at work (past or present)
I found this question difficult to answer since it's asking for an individual ‘guru’, and that's not usually where I get inspiration. I have been inspired by a number of social movements within academia and health services development. These have included evidence-based medicine, medical humanities (‘narrative-based medicine’), complexity theory, patient-centred medicine and participatory research. Many individuals within each of these broad streams of thought have inspired me; a few people (such as Anna Donald) have shared my interest in more than one of them as well as seeking to challenge the various evangelistic dogmas that have characterized all of them from time to time. If I were to pick one person as my ‘inspiration’ it would be the psychologist Jerome Bruner, who began writing in the 1930s and is still active today, well into his 90s. Bruner wrote a book called Acts of Meaning which moved psychology beyond its obsession with inputs and outputs (the stimulus–response paradigm) and re-focused it on the essence of what makes us human – the making of meaning. Bruner's contribution to medicine defined what makes our work different from our veterinary colleagues.
5. The most significant achievement of your career
‘Doing the juggle’ – holding down an academic job while also being a wife and mother and managing major life events in the extended family. The official accolades (papers published, lectures given, prizes won) mean very little compared to 22 years of happy marriage, two well-balanced sons whose careers are just beginning, and the knowledge that my father was well cared for in his final illness. I try to run a ‘family friendly’ unit so that all my staff from the senior lecturer to the office junior are able to achieve their potential without making unfair compromises in their personal lives.
6. List your reasons for choosing this career
I guess I was born with an appetite for academic challenges. When I was 17, I was interviewed by a young bioichemist called Tim Hunt for a place at Clare College Cambridge. He asked me seven questions, the last of which was ‘What sort of doctor do you want to be?’ I told him I wanted to be a brain surgeon. At the end of the interview, he asked me if I had any questions for him, and I said, ‘Yes, can you please tell me if I got any of your questions right?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘you got them all wrong.’ He then explained the answers, and I said I could see where I'd gone wrong in each case, and found myself asking more questions as he explained various scientific principles. ‘And as for my last question,’ he said, ‘you won't end up as a brain surgeon, you'll end up in research.’ I got my place at Cambridge because research isn't about knowing the right answers before you start, it's about how you ask the questions and how systematically you go about finding the answers. Hunt, who later told me that his objective in interviewing candidates was to spot those with the ‘research gene’, went on to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
7. Alternative career (in another lifetime)
Novelist.
8. Non-medical book(s) you are currently reading
Henry James' Selected Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) which I bought in a second-hand bookshop only yesterday. That was lucky, because if you'd asked last week I would have had to admit that I was still on one from Richard and Judy's Summer Reading List.
9. Song(s)/piece(s) of music you are currently listening to
Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A Minor. But I did have to yell upstairs and ask Spouse what it was.
10. How do you wind down at the end of the working day?
Glass of dry white wine, supper en famille (typically cooked by 17-year-old son who currently fancies himself as a celeb chef), 15 minutes on back massage machine.