Realistic Medicine and You

Mary outlines how you can get involved in the Realistic Medicine Team’s new social media campaign.

You may have heard the phrase ‘Realistic Medicine’ being used more often in recent years. When Chief Medical Officer Catherine Calderwood released her first annual report in 2015, Realistic Medicine took the medical world by storm, with over ten million impressions on Twitter and an outpouring of support from the medical community.

What is Realistic Medicine?

It’s not, as the name might seem to suggest, the opposite of ‘impractical medicine’! We want people working in health and social care, and people who use these services, to think about the values and the behaviours that lead to good experiences. Drawing on these values will help doctors, nurses and care workers to have meaningful conversations with people about their care, and will support staff and patients to base treatment options around what matters most to people.

To achieve this, people using healthcare services and their families must feel empowered to discuss their treatment fully with healthcare professionals, in language that works for them and using information that helps them to understand all their options. Everyone should feel able to ask their healthcare professional why they’ve suggested a test, treatment or procedure, and all decisions about a person’s care should be made jointly between the individual and their healthcare team.

Realistic Medicine puts the person receiving care at the centre of decision-making and creates a supported, personalised approach. It aims to reduce harm and waste while championing innovation and improvement. These concepts are essential to a well-functioning and sustainable NHS for the future.

And that’s where you come in!

The Realistic Medicine Social Media Campaign

We want to hear about your experiences of discussing your heath and care with your doctor, or other members of your healthcare team – the good and the not-so-good, the sad and the uplifting, the times it was easy and the times it was hard.

Please send us a short video clip, about two minutes long, that talks about your experiences of talking with your healthcare professionals. We’ll use some of your videos to create a social media campaign to help other people feel more confident about talking to their healthcare professionals about what really matters to them.

Please note that by sending your videos, you’ll be agreeing for them to be used on social media to promote the need to have more meaningful conversations between professionals and patients. If selected, your video might be edited for length or clarity, and shared on social media – however, we will only use your videos to promote more meaningful conversations.

You can hear more about our campaign by watching Dr Calderwood’s video here (this link will take you away from our website). Please send your videos to my.experience@gov.scot by Monday the 27th of August.

Thank you, and we very much look forward to hearing from you.

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