Bedside Reading Bedside Reading Podcast

A warm welcome today to Dani Hall who is here to talk about Donal Ryan's The Queen of Dirt Island . This is a book that I'd heard quite a lot about and not picked up until Dani suggested that I ought to read it.  I started reading and had to text her after about 5 minutes to say "oh my goodness this is so good, why haven't I picked this up before?" so I really hope you're going to enjoy our conversation today. The book tells the story of four generations  of women in a family in Ireland. We think about teenage pregnancy, we think about what it is to be a teenager, we think about the role of women of society, of the need for scaffolding,  of wisdom and compassion. It's a brilliant book and I thoroughly enjoy talking to Dani about it.

Dani and I first connected via https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/ which is an amazing paediatric Free Open Access Medical Education resource. DFTB also run conferences and live events and I'm fortunate to teach on the MSc in Paediatric Emergency Medicine which Dani is a course director for https://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/taught/coursefinder/courses/paediatric-emergency-medicine-online-msc/

Today is a special episode of the podcast where I'm welcoming friends, leaders from all sorts of branches of healthcare to share a book that means something to them about leadership.

We would like to dedicate this episode to the memory of Dr Jenny Vaughan who died recently. She was perhaps best known for her campaigning work with Doctors Association UK, https://www.dauk.org/ leading the learn not blame campaign and championing the concept of just culture as well as for campaigning on behalf of Mr David Sellu and Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garber. In this she was the embodiment of authentic allyship and anti-racist leadership and a role model for us all.

Some of the book choices in this episode might well be on a leadership course reading list, some probably aren't. All of them should be though I suppose it depends who's writing the list and what they mean by leadership!  I hope here we have a diversity of thought and a number of reflections on the different facets of leadership on what they mean to these wonderful people who are leaders in their own fields.

We have some classic children's fiction: The Jungle Book and Alice in Wonderland. We have a military leadership manual. We have books about psychology, about self-help, we have short stories and all sorts of others. A huge thank you to everyone who's been involved in making this episode and I hope that after you've listened you really will be in a position to take your leadership to the next level.

Partha Kar recommends The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
https://twitter.com/parthaskar

Anna Baverstock recommends Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
https://twitter.com/anna_annabav

Erin Carn-Bennett recommends Think Again by Adam Grant
https://twitter.com/erincarnbennett

Caroline Walker aka The Joyful Doctor recommends the Jeeves and Wooster series by PG Wodehouse
https://twitter.com/joyful_doctor

Evie Mensah recommends Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uche Blackstock
https://twitter.com/eveosh

Helen Blomfield recommends Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux
https://twitter.com/helenblomfield8

Nicola Fisher recommends Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
https://twitter.com/NicolaFisherRN
Dave Hindmarsh recommends Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet
https://twitter.com/GP_Templates

Margaret Ikpoh recommends Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
https://twitter.com/docmagsy

Claire McKie recommends The Promise that Changes Everything by Nancy Kline
https://twitter.com/claire_mckie_

It's a real honour today to welcome Professor Chloe Orkin to Bedside Reading . Chloe  is a researcher, an HIV specialist, a doctor, and an unwell woman and we talk about what that means in the context of Eleanor Cleghorn's brilliant book Unwell Women: a journey through medicine and myth in a man-made world. We talk about feminism, we talk about medical heroes,  we talk about epistemic, testimonial and hermaneutic injustice . I've had a brilliant time talking to Chloe and she has really really made me think even more than I have done after reading Unwell Women. I really hope you'll enjoy our conversation today.

Follow Chloe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/profchloeorkin

Chloe is the immediate past president of https://www.medicalwomensfederation.org.uk/

We mention an article Chloe wrote which had a big impact on my thinking, read it here: https://bmjleader.bmj.com/content/7/2/88

A warm welcome today to Ben Allen, a GP from Sheffield who is here to talk to me about Amy Edmondson's second book The Right Kind of Wrong which is all about celebrating and learning from failure. Failure is something that health care professionals are not particularly good at.  It's something that we are so often afraid of. So frequently people talk about airline safety and the lessons that can be learned from aviation and those that can be translated into health care and then we wonder why aren't we doing this? What's holding us back? What do we need to know to do this better?

It's such an accessible and really good book and I love Amy Edmondson anyway so it was really interesting talking to Ben who has really embraced the idea of "Intelligent failure" in trying new new things,  not being afraid to try and to fail and always to see life as a learning experience. It was a delight to talk to him. It's a great book and I really hope you're going to enjoy listening.

Follow Ben on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/BenAllenGP

As many regular listeners may know I absolutely love talking to authors about their books, especially healthcare professional authors and today is one of those episodes.

I am so delighted to welcome Leah Hazard to the podcast to talk about her book Womb: the inside story of where we all began which is a phenomenal book literally for anybody. If only we could get this book into the PHSE curriculum for all young people,  if only we could get all adults to read it. It is phenomenally accessible. It is scientifically so accurate and so brilliant. 

Follow Leah on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/hazard_leah or on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/leahhazard

It's a joy today to welcome back Kirsty Shires to Bedside Reading. Kirsty and I first connected last year over Michael Rosen's Many Different Kinds of Love and she emailed me a few weeks ago to tell me about a book that she thought I ought to read which actually I had read before many years ago!  I've absolutely loved coming back to it.  Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down  is the story of a Hmong refugee family and their daughter Lia set in California in the early nineties and some of the culture clash and culture shock that exists between their understanding of their daughter's condition, epilepsy, which in their language means "the spirit catches you and you fall down" and her American doctors. It is a phenomenal read. It was wonderful to talk to Kirsty today about some of the themes from it and what we've both learned and what we've changed in our practice as a result of having read it.

One of the really big practice changing aspects for us both was discovering Arthur Klienman's eight questions which Kirsty decribes as "like ICE on steroids" and which make a HUGE difference in practice when used appropriately:
 https://thinkculturalhealth.hhs.gov/assets/pdfs/resource-library/arthur-kleinmans-eight-questions.pdf

Kirsty also recommended A Smell of Burning  by Colin Grant
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/19/a-smell-of-burning-the-story-of-epilepsy-colin-grant-review