BMJ  2006;333 (30 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7570.0-g

Editor's choice

Character building

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Career Focus this week collects together a series of "character building" experiences (http://careerfocus.bmjjournals.com). These include being suspended from practice for a cocaine habit, being exposed as a plagiarist, and being a colleague of serial murderer Harold Shipman and subsequently being criticised by a public inquiry.

The point is that all these doctors survived these experiences and probably came away from them stronger. The anonymous former cocaine addict found that the strictness of the General Medical Council's processes worked in his favour and became a powerful motivator to his becoming abstinent. The former plagiarist, writing under a pen name, has clearly learnt her lesson—possibly because the personal consequences of being found out were severe. And Raj Patel, who practised opposite Harold Shipman's practice and sometimes countersigned his cremation forms, explains how, stung by criticism over the way his practice continued to handle cremation forms, he and his colleagues started . . . [Full text of this article]

Jane Smith, deputy editor

(jsmith@bmj.com)


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Bullying and harassment in medical schools
Diana F Wood
BMJ 2006 333: 664-665. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

US agency recommends opportunistic HIV testing
Bob Roehr
BMJ 2006 333: 669. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Are eligibility criteria for over the counter statins appropriate?
D Graham Mackenzie, Sarah H Wild, and Philip Rutledge
BMJ 2006 333: 704. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Detecting plagiarism: Current quality control systems don't work
Tom Jefferson
BMJ 2006 333: 706. [Extract] [Full Text]

"Did you ever suffer from any mental illness?"
Arnob Chakraborti
BMJ 2006 333: 709. [Extract] [Full Text]

Experiences of belittlement and harassment and their correlates among medical students in the United States: longitudinal survey
Erica Frank, Jennifer S Carrera, Terry Stratton, Janet Bickel, and Lois Margaret Nora
BMJ 2006 333: 682. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Access jobs at BMJ Careers
Whats new online at Student BMJ