‘Does your patient really understand?’

‘Research shows that more than 80 percent of patients have poor health literacy. Cutting the jargon, asking direct questions and simplifying signage are among the ways hospitals are working to improve communication – and care.’

This is an abstract from an article with the same title, written by C Huff and published in the journal Hospital Health Network. I was moved to add these comments.

Writing to length

“Do me 450 words on Solar PV, please.” That was the editor of a local county magazine. So that’s what she got: not 449, not 451, but 450 words. On Solar PV.

Go to any high point in Sussex on a bright sunny day, look north, and you’ll see the flash of reflected sunlight from Solar PV rooftop arrays on farmhouses and in towns and villages across the countryside. Since the government established its earn-as-you-generate scheme in April last year, Solar PV installations have increased month on month, as we discover our green credentials.

Small scents

I’ve just closed a small photo exhibition comprising five of my images.

The exhibition was called Small Scents, and the images were from a set of perfume miniatures that had been part of the collection of my late mother, Peggy.

To pee, or not to pee

Several years ago I undertook what was probably the strangest writing task that has ever been offered to me. The Dutch sanitaryware manufacturer Royal Sphinx Gustavsberg had produced a women’s urinal, the Lady P, and was about to launch it in the UK. It was the brainchild of industrial design graduate Marian Loth, and Loth’s aim had been to speed up the queues in ladies’ lavatories and at the same time to improve hygiene – apparently the user was meant to “hover” rather than sit. Loth is quoted as saying that “The Lady P principal is piss and go”.

What did I say?

I bumped into my GP the other day.

We were both walking our dogs, and fell into step along the old railway line – as we quite often seem to do. He knows I work in medicine, and so he sometimes opens up about his thoughts in a way that he wouldn’t do with most of his patients. I suppose we’ve become friends over the years, though.

That’s not fair!

As the playground plaint is echoed in Parliament, Martyn Oliver considers the coalition’s focus on fairness.
 
The date for the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review is drawing near, and David Cameron and his cabinet colleagues are seeking to justify the predicted cuts – most particularly the cuts in longterm benefits – on the ground of fairness.

The biter bit

I’m a copy-editor. Another way of putting it would be to say that I’m a nit-picker. I do write quite a bit: I write other people’s stuff when they can’t string two words together for themselves, and I write my own stuff too. But essentially I look for the mistakes that other people make in their written work. When I find them, I pounce on them – not with glee; more often with a sense of profound despair – and I put them right. That’s to say, I put them into a version of English that conforms to my idea of how English ought to be written. That’s what I do. I can dress it up, valorise it, say that I test arguments, increase the reader’s apprehension, blah blah … But essentially, I make my living from other people’s mistakes.

Fear of disgrace

Every so often I come across a few words or a couple of lines that seem to encapsulate a small section of the zeitgeist. I scribble them down, but sometimes they never see the light of day again.

I found this at the bottom of my wardrobe this morning:

If I were tempted to try to defraud a railway company by travelling without a ticket, the fear of disgrace in the event of discovery would be a far more powerful deterrent than the legal penalty.

Not so any longer; there is now no fear of disgrace.

 
Whoever wrote the original, I salute you.

I don’t usually …

… do this, but I think this portrait of Tilda Swinton is remarkable.

Tilda Swinton 2010 (photo by Ryan Pfluger)

Grayson Perry at 50

After 50, says Grayson Perry, “a man should never pass a lavatory, never trust a fart and never waste an erection”.

Oh, what good advice!