How can different kinds of knowledge work help me?

Changing the context can change practice. We have mentioned relationship-based care and knowledge work and clinical scholarship. How do these things link together?

Knowledge work help us not just with managing difficult clinical problems but also with providing relationship-based care.

In a famous psychology experiment students were asked to count the number of passes in a recorded basketball game made by players wearing white. Halfway through the video a player in a gorilla suit walks in, looks at the camera and thumps his chest. Almost half the participants didn’t notice the gorilla. This is an example of selective attention, when we are focused on one thing, it is easy to miss the bigger picture or the important piece of new knowledge you could find. In the same way if we view our job as purely applying evidence based medicine via guidelines and protocols we may miss discovering and creating new knowledge. If we view our job as co-creating and sharing knowledge, with our patients, our colleagues and wider society, we open up whole new avenues of attention and discovery.

Over to you

• What changes your practice?
• Is it purely new guidelines or recommendations or do other things change your practice too?
• Can you give an example of something you might have read or listened to or discussed with a colleague that made you look at things differently?

Please share your thoughts with colleagues in the Comments as usual.