Dress codes and skydiving: this year on Sharp Scratch

Becoming a doctor requires more than passing exams. Some of the skills you need to be a safe, healthy, patient centred doctor cannot be learnt in a lecture but they can be “absorbed” by watching the doctors and other healthcare professionals you see on placements. These skills make up the “hidden curriculum,” which is not explicitly taught but passed down generations of healthcare professionals through role models—good and bad ones.

Sharp Scratch is the podcast that brings the hidden medical curriculum into the open. I hosted the first episode—How to survive the night shift—in 2019 while working for The BMJ. We now have 10 regular contributors—medical students and junior doctors from across the United Kingdom (fig 1).

These are my five favourite episodes of 2020 so far.