read everything
Read everything. Solid advice for young writers and artists, to gain as much variety in exposure to art, history – everything.
This is here because... this applies to medicine too. Emergency medicine, I think, values as broad an experience as you can get. The more you get exposed to, the more you see and hear, the better you recognise patterns
Apart from time, what I've found helpful is:
reading and listening to people talking about medicine
talking to specialties about our referrals – not just “yes” or “no”, but what they would do, how they interpret investigations and so on
The “old school” doctors often lament the cynicism and disillusionment of current junior doctors. It is fairly uncontroversial that doctors from a couple of generations ago were expected to have a broad skillset and knowledge base, even within specialty, often having had much more gruelling hours and levels of cover that would be considered safe nowadays. Again this doesn't seem to apply as much to emergency medicine, but specialty doctors nowadays are expected to have a narrow range of skills. Perhaps on a system scale this is more economical. But I think, as individual doctors, we only lose out when we limit our
If only I could actually remember all these things.