The Vein Hunter

I am a vein hunter. A tracker of blood, a tribesman of the tributaries of the heart, a pursuer of the pleasures of deoxygenated blood.

Every day, I'm asked to find small veins in elderly people. They tend to be invisible, barely palpable, and wriggly. Holding them down to get a small needle in is like pinning down Harry Houdini on how he did his tricks, or Gordon Brown on when the next election is.

It sounds like a truism, but the real differences between junior doctors and medical students are actually quite subtle. As a student, I often tried to take blood or insert a cannula. But every time I approached a patient, it was with the knowledge that success would be a bonus rather than the expected result.

Now, even though the task is the same, I take three times as much equipment with me: come what may, I have to come away with the red stuff. Failure is not an option. I don't want my patients to croak before the ward round tomorrow. Neither do I want the indignity of having to ask a nurse to do it for me.

This constant focus on finding veins is disrupting my personal life. Tube journeys are nothing more than a prolonged look at strangers' hands. Same goes for parties and restaurants. Flicking through the tabloids over breakfast, even the more popular parts of page 3 girls get only a cursory glance before I assess their venous access. It's embarrassing.

Maybe it's just an obvious sign of a deeper malaise. I rush around without ever having the time to examine someone properly. Clinical skills teaching with the medical students on my team is about the longest I spend with any one patient. So it's not surprising I'm constantly trying to pick up things with simple observation.

This doesn't mean you won't be a little nervous if you catch someone on the bus staring at your hands. But maybe you shouldn't shove them in your pockets straight away. Try pointing to a vein, and smiling encouragingly. It'll make your junior doctor's day.

The Clinical Incident

Throughout the ages, small pieces of paper have changed the lives of millions of people. Voting slips. Eviction notices. Parking fines.

But these pale in comparison to the sheet of paper that rules the NHS with an iron fist. It's the Mao Tse Tung of the written word. The Joseph Stalin of A4. It's known as "The Clinical Incident Form".

It's supposed to be a routine thing, a little message to the hospital managers when something's gone wrong. It's supposed to help minimise the chances of the same mistake being made twice.

Like any well-intentioned bureaucratic device allowed out into the real world, it's grown into something very different. Nurses now brandish The Clinical Incident Form as a weapon. Forgot to write up fluids? They could end your career with a well-filled out page 1. Did you wash your hands just out of sight of the "Handwashing Audit" team, losing the ward valuable "points? You better get ready to be Formed.

Even though the worst that can happen is a mild-mannered email from Risk Management, getting the Form feels something like getting a sexually-transmitted infection. You don't want either of them, and they both tend to come from a nurse you'd rather not wake up with more than once.

The pen-pushing culture is running riot at the moment. Must be something to do with waking up in the dark and having to wear a proper winter coat in the mornings. We were brutally wrenched from the wards earlier this week, dedicating an entire morning to talking about "diversity in the NHS". This was considered more important - and thus worthy of more teaching time - than something rare and of little clinical use, like how to deal with a heart attack.

Once again, I fear that our superiors haven't quite got the hang of how to say NO to the Department of Health and its bizarre priorities. Surely that should be a Clinical Incident?

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Genius

The (under)Graduate

My partnership with the Mountain Goat has been put on hiatus: I've joined a different firm. I now accompany The Big Cheese for his ward rounds. In management circles, this is known as "being headhunted". Or "constructive dismissal".

The Big Cheese runs a tight ship, which means that the ward round's conducted at the speed of light. There's barely enough time to collect the registrar and the students before it starts, let alone find the nurse taking care of each patient.

The one-minute-medicine approach works well for the consultant, who's then free to play golf and eat small junior doctors for the rest of the day. Consultant Surgeons see everything in black and white: you're either ready for surgery or ready to go home. Convalescence is for wimps. This speeds up the discharge process.

It's less efficient from my perspective: I spend the rest of my day answering phone calls from nurses. They get concerned when their patients disappear home, especially if it happens during their breaks, which take up approximately 65% of their working day. I've seen a nurse arrive at work, take off her coat, and be told by her supervisor that it's time for her break.

When a nurse is "on her break" she is not to be disturbed. I've never seen it myself - I'm not allowed in the staff room, which is for registered nurses only - but I'm told that they put themselves into a Zen-like state, into which no earthly problem can intrude. I imagine they write haikus, play the mandolin, and discuss the philosophical issues of the day, before dusting themselves down and doing the drug round.

To add to the general chaos, the Big Cheese has taken on an assortment of new medical students. They're so fresh to the wards that one of them - with no sense of irony whatsoever - declared "I love patients".

Even the nurse on her break cracked a smile at that one.