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)


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