Yet, I couldn’t exit the room. The blood was now up to my knees and the liquid applied pressure to the door preventing me from opening it. At least that’s what I suspected; physics had never been my strong point. There was a high probability of other forces at work against me for the door could not be removed from its hinges either, even with the assistance of a scalpel handle. Comedian and broadcaster Dr Phil Hammond's How I Ruined Medicine draws on his own experiences to ask if his investigations into medical malpractice have done more harm than good for healthcare overall. Language is a form of entertainment. Beautiful language can be like beautiful music: it can amuse, inspire, mystify, enlighten.

I do not have the luxury of saying in response to mass shootings “well there shouldn’t be shootings” or “we should ban guns” or any such macro-level political ‘solutions.’ I am tasked with doing something productive for the population I serve in the face of this risk. Calls for mental health funding, red flag laws, media reform, or various flavors of gun control are all well and good but are part of a separate discussion. Those long-term systemic policy discussions are not going to help the victim of a shooting who’s bleeding out on the ground while the police are searching for the shooter. But bystander or self-intervention to stop the bleeding could.

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A lifetime ago in school, in residency, we were hammered home the principles of the ABCs when it came to an emergency situation. You had to make sure the airway was clear. That was A. You probably dropped by to see if I was going to be funny. And I'm going to disappoint you on that front. Instead, I'm going to share the thoughts of Jose Rivera ( Cloud Tectonics, Marisol, References to Salvidor Dali Make Me Hot, et al) on playwriting, a subject near and dear to my heart (not to mention my master's degree and my student loans). These are some of the most compelling thoughts about the subject I've ever read. And while it's long and probably not a topic you give a flip about ... read it anyway. It's provocative, and I promise you'll find something to think about. For BBC Radio 4, coverage will begin with Dr Kevin Fong and Isabel Hardman in a special episode of Start the Week alongside GP Phil Whitaker and the historian Andrew Seaton. Also that week, a one-off documentary The NHS at 75: Covid Memories will reflect on the pandemic through the experience of health service staff. I guess you’re hoping that somewhere in this pointless, rambling discourse, I have a point that ties all this together. And I do, sort of. It is this: Rhythm is key. Use as many sounds and cadences as possible. Think of dialogue as a form of percussive music. You can vary the speed of the language, the number of beats per line, volume, density. You can use silences, fragments, elongated sentences, interruptions, overlapping conversation, physical activity, monologues, nonsense, non-sequiturs, foreign languages.

Live is giving over 11 hours of output to their audience - to tell us about their experiences of the NHS - good, bad and future concerns. To my right, a crimson curtain cascaded down, splashing and deteriorating into the pool that I found myself lying in. In a dreamlike daze, I held my fingers up to the warm and dripping liquid, let it run down my hand and forearm. How the light glinted off of the blood. There's no time limit to writing plays. Think of playwriting as a life-long apprenticeship. Imagine you may have your best ideas on your deathbed. This couldn’t be real. At any point I would wake up from the most realistic nightmare I’d ever had, spend the waking hour with relief that the horrors I had witnessed were nonexistent in waking life.I thought of this phrase a few days ago, during a particularly difficult biopsy. Most of my procedures involve very little bleeding, but this one was giving me heartburn. No matter what I did, the patient continued to ooze. I even got some blood on my clothes “gasp!” Now, I recognize that the few cc’s of blood I’m talking about would make a trauma surgeon laugh. Those guys are used to gushers, arterial pumpers, being doused in some poor patient’s blood. But I’m just a quiet, bookish radiologist, and my procedures tend to be very safe and clean. Good playwriting is a collaboration between your many selves. The more multiple your personalities, the further, wider, deeper you will be able to go. If realism is as artificial as any genre, strive to create your own realism. If theatre is a handicraft in which you make one of a kind pieces, then you're in complete control of your fictive universe. What are its physical laws? What's gravity like? What does time do? What are the rules of cause and effect? How do your characters behave in this altered universe?

This is obviously bar-napkin math, but you begin to see why people who do what I do often pursue what to the public may seem like counterintuitive aims. “Why are we spending all this money on training when we could invest it in armed guards to keep people safe?”. Mass-training programs, like the now decades-long push to teach the public CPR, provide a lot of benefits compared to the relatively modest investment required. From 10 July, Radio 4 will interrogate the current challenges facing the NHS and consider suggested solutions with four-part documentary series The NHS: Who Cares? presented by Kevin Fong. The series will bust myths as it takes a hard look at the realities of the modern day complexities of providing healthcare fit for 21st century Britain. In Al Smith's two part drama, All Bleeding Stops Eventually, the NHS is examined from the viewpoint of a doctor who becomes a patient.

BBC One

Leaving aside the question of if high school students are “children”, I agree with the impulse. It is important not to unnecessarily terrorize people, especially children, with things (like mass shootings or cardiac arrests) which are very unlikely. I should differentiate between “mass shooter training” and bleeding control training. Mass shooter training (if a shooter comes into the school this is what we’ll do) is something which I do not believe we should be doing with young school children. It effectively terrorizes children over something that is extraordinarily unlikely, creating a fear that need not exist. It’d be like doing home invasion drills with your children, why would you want to put that thought in their heads before they are old enough to process the probability of ever being a victim of a home invasion? Florence Nightingale was an activist, a social reformer, a statistician, and a bold nurse who defied stifling British conventions to change history. An indisputable pioneer, Nightingale died in 1910 aged of 90, leaving behind an inspirational legacy that benefits everyone’s medical care today. I’ve just got a bleeder in here somewhere that I need to stop. These things happen sometimes. No need to worry.” Which leads me to another of my favorite old medical phrases: Tincture of Time. A tincture, for those of you who are not pharmacists in the 1910’s, is a concentrated liquid herbal extract, made from soaking plants with assumed medical properties in alcohol. So, Tincture of Time is the “medicine” of just waiting for a patient to heal themselves. Sometimes, that’s the best thing to do. Or the only thing to do. If you’ve already tried all the actual medicines. If you took the average body temperatures of the folks that end up in this hot tub, you’d get a reference point of about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). Give or take.