Coffee time is about much more than coffee

The days I don’t make it to morning coffee are the worst days. On these too-busy days the time after surgery haemorrhages into house visits and urgent telephone calls. I’ll be trying to get hold of someone at the hospital—while that someone is trying to get hold of me. I’ll have received badly abnormal blood results but no phone number for the patient. And, of course, I’ll have forgotten the latest computer password that I’ll have written down in several notebooks, none of which I can find.

Coffee time is about succour. I am blessed to work at a practice where it is a time to debate clinical decisions, to …