From Grafton Bridge

The email war continued for the first hour or more after getting to work. Some satisfaction from decreasing the number of unanswered emails my assistant has put into a folder labelled urgent. Then there were urgent assessments of some of the patients, before being urgently called to a telephone liaison with a community centre clinical team. That was followed by a senior staff meeting to determine who was ready for discharge to allow admission of the next person in urgent need of a bed. 

Urgency then took a back seat as we had our weekly Multidisciplinary Team meeting to plan the next week's interventions. Like all such meetings, too much time was spent on the first to be discussed which means too little on the last ones. I probably need to lead it more. Which usually results in complaints that the meeting has become too medical.

More meetings (management team followed by senior medical staff)before I sat with my sandwiches and a few minutes to try and cmplete the Guardian cryptic I had started over breakfast. (Finally finished it after getting home). Hadn't finished sandwich or coffee, let alone crossword puzzle, when my registrar came looking for me to do the remainder of the day's urgent assessments. Including paperwork associated with the assessments.

The afternoon's work was interrupted almost every ten minutes by an urgent phone call. The most frustrating was a 15 min call from a psychiatrist who wanted advice about use of the Mental Health Act, and had clearly determined beforehand that for me to help on a legal matter I would have to be given extensive details of the patient's history.

The work day ended with an urgent meeting with a senior colleague who was seeking support for opposing a direction management are proposing in a reorganisation of roles and responsibilities. I was happy to then get on my bike and cycle very nonurgently back across Grafton Bridge to the apartment. Taking the photo meant that I was not in front of the bus as I stayed put through a whole phase of the traffic lights.