What I know I owe to patients

When I was young I trained in medicine. I studied hard and learned many things. I was anxious, but because I knew that I knew a lot, I wasn’t afraid to make decisions. I thought I was a pretty good doctor. But I didn’t know quite how much I didn’t know.

Over the past decade, as one of the team running Patient Opinion (www.patientopinion.org.uk), a non-profit online public feedback service for UK healthcare, I have read thousands of stories of care—good and bad—contributed by patients and their relatives. Many are written with remarkable insight and thoughtfulness. And so I have come to know some of what I didn’t know then.