ABSTRACT
How should people be treated? How should they be represented on the public stage of decision-and policy-making?
C4: I remember one of the ward rounds you [to R1] sat in on, one of the things that is perhaps more difficult in psychiatry [compared to rheumatology, general surgery and pain management] is knowing, if you don’t know someone very well on the staff, medical or not, what is their level of expertise? What can you assume they know and what they do not, and there was one ward round a few weeks ago when the physiotherapist was sitting there, who was, whom I’ve seen before, he was moving around a lot, and I had no idea actually how much of his physiotherapy training had actually been targeted to mental health as a discipline, so how aware he was of our jargon, our habits, our bad points, how we deal with things. And there was a placement that he had quite a few dealings with because of physical problems so I asked him, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Well, she’s very confused and she’s very paranoid.’ And this lady did not come in with paranoia.
