A Day in the Life of a Trauma Surgeon

Those of you who attended the Turin conference will remember the inspiring double act on violence reduction we were privileged to hear about from Will Linden and Martin Griffiths. This issue's “Day in the life …” describes a regular Monday in the life of the very same Martin Griffiths, a trauma surgeon at St Bartholomew Hospital in London, UK and the National Clinical Director in Violence Reduction for NHS England.

So here is Martin.

This Monday I did the early morning scramble of getting the kids up and ready for school. Having dropped them off, I caught up with my PA first thing, then had a meeting with the National Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Network which seeks to improve diversity in NHS practice followed by a preparatory meeting with the Kings Fund for a piece I'm developing around violence reduction and diverse leadership. I might have managed to grab a coffee before my Tower Hamlets Council meeting on improving diversity in their appointment procedures but I can't be sure! Then it was time for my challenging cases team meeting from 1pm to 2.30pm.

I met with my fellow surgeons from the trauma service to discuss the cases which required some complex decision-making over the last month. For example, we discussed a patient who had fallen onto a railing sustaining a fairly severe vascular, abdominal injury. We had to open and close his belly several times over the course of a few weeks and we were discussing whether we could have done it any differently. Us surgeons, who work at the cutting edge of what is possible, have no signposts for what we do, so we use this meeting to examine whether what we did manage to do could have been done better should we face this particular medical emergency again. For instance, I operated on a five-year-old who had been shot in the heart—I have now done two of them in my thirty-year career—and I think one other clinician in our team has ever faced that particular situation. I think nationally there have only been five exampl