Improving telephone consultation skills in clinicians

The ability to consult by telephone is now an integral part of any modern patient-centred healthcare system and the British Medical Association (BMA) has provided guidance for general practitioners (Consulting in the modern world, which was published in 2001). The BMA concludes that "telephone consultations when correctly conducted can be considered to be safe and acceptable practice". In a protocol for a Cochrane Review, Rumant Grewal and colleagues explain how they will identify and measure the effectiveness of interventions that aim to improve the clinician telephone consultation skills of clinicians. Grewal and colleagues believe that their review will provide evidence about the most effective interventions for improving telephone consultation skills and thereby improve both quality of care and patients' experiences of their health care.

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What is the difference between primordial prevention and primary prevention?

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Our article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine argues that safe and effective AI in healthcare must incorporate mechanisms that emulate human judgement - down-weighting old, inaccurate or superseded information and prioritising what is recent, clinically relevant and reaffirmed - so that AI supports, rather than disrupts, high-quality patient care. Clinicians constantly revise, reinterpret and filter past information so that only what is relevant, accurate and timely shapes present-day management decisions; medical records function as dynamic “working tools” rather than fixed archives. By contrast, many AI systems lack this capacity for selective forgetting and often treat all historical data as equally meaningful. This can lead to outdated or low-confidence diagnoses being repeatedly resurfaced, persistent labels influencing clinical expectations, and irrelevant, long-resolved events cluttering summaries and decision-support outputs. Such indiscriminate recall...

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