Sportsman’s groin and other stories . . .

In the heat of the fray, clinicians tend to prioritise looking after patients over writing things down. But when they are assessed by others, it is usually on the basis of what they wrote down, rather than what they did for patients. A study that observed the working practices of clinicians in a Sydney teaching hospital found that emergency room doctors had to switch from one task to another unexpectedly six times an hour, whereas on the wards this happened only twice an hour (BMJ Qual Saf 2013, doi:10.1136/bmjqs-2013-002097). But on the wards, clinicians tended to keep themselves busy by doing several things at the same time. Minerva is glad to see that looking after patients came first in both contexts.

A BMJ editorial in 2005 suggested that the term “heart failure” should be dropped because it alarms patients and confuses clinicians. A further refinement of confusion comes from classifying patients with clinical features of …