A note from the Editor,Education for Primary Care
Dominic has every right to be critical: this section depends on his independent view both for its interest and for its helpfulness to readers who don’t make a habit of reading as widely as he does. As Dominic says, there is nothing like a good row, and reading Dominic’s column keeps my soul alive and my peristalsis active. (Please can someone explain to me about arboreo-ursine bowel evacuation – see paper 7?)
However, I feel moved to point out two things. Firstly, as educationalists, I think our readership stands to gain much, not only from reading the original article but also from reading alongside it the correspondence in BJGP 2 months later (August) 2011; 61: 491–6. Secondly, after the slapstick, let’s sit down to think about fallibility in the age of bloggers and media-storms.
The letter pages include not only a response from the authors, but also from Roger Jones as Editor, BJGP. He had the guts to convene a meeting of the Editorial Board and to include their comments in his response including their criticism of his overly-positive highlighting of the paper.
As far as fallibility, let me also give my personal opinion here: I don’t know either the editor or the scientists well. Nonetheless, Roger Jones remains a very fine editor in my opinion: I admire him for his authenticity, his science, and his judgement, which I think has done a lot to make BJGP a better journal. Accepting that he may have goofed on the publicity for this paper does not lead me to change this stance. Likewise, amongst the scientists, Nicky Britten stands out in my mind as one of the quite exceptional qualitative scientists in primary care, and although I line up with the critics of this paper, the reputation of this group is undiminished for me: they are trying to address difficult issues and they will not always manage to convince the scientific community – that is the nature of the enterprise. My hope is that the blogging community, for all the fun they give us, will stop short of returning to the age of the stocks. A safe place to try (and, therefore, to fail sometimes) is one of my aspirations for medical education.
