Evening Visiting Time...

Earlier this evening I took this shot outside our new Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy. A great new building, and hopefully widely staffed by the type of medical professional Barbara saw earlier this week, with myself in attendance.

He was relatively young, not yet a consultant, but very impressive from a judgment and decision making point of view - something still quite rare amongst professionals in my view.

His approach was to precisely articulate chances of both success and failure of a possible operation contrasted with doing nothing. He was also able to articulate enough regarding possible outcomes for Barbara to assess these in the light of her own values.

This approach, for the academic known as applied decision theory, is something I am interested in, and indeed wrote an essay entitled Mhairi's Dilemma for the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making some years ago recalling a practical example of where I used the technique, albeit in simplified form, when our youngest daughter Mhairi (ten years old at the time) faced making a decision of whether or not to or attend a funeral.

In my view too many professionals, whether doctors, lawyers, policy makers or other professionals rely on intuition or merely discussing matters with colleagues before making important decisions. They would do well to follow the practice of the young doctor Barbara was fortunate enough to meet this week.