Noura has two names on a referral letter and one night to choose between them. After 20 years of diabetes, her father’s kidneys are failing, the GP said. He needs a specialist before his next blood test. He also stopped taking one of his tablets in March, and nobody knows except her. It is 11 o’clock. She sits at the kitchen table with a ginger tea gone cold and a doctor open in each tab.
The first page reads:
“Dr [Name] is a Consultant Nephrologist and Intensivist with extensive experience in the management of chronic kidney disease, dialysis and renal transplantation. He holds dual accreditation in Renal Medicine and Intensive Care Medicine. He is committed to delivering compassionate, patient-centred care.”
The second page says the same thing under another hospital’s logo. With nothing else to choose by, she books the first, because his clinic has parking.
The doctor she booked had already told a better story about himself. I heard it in a recording of an interview he gave about his career. I rewrote his page to start there:
“His father was an anaesthetist. In Malawi in the 1980s, whenever the family travelled, his father took a bag with medicine in it, and equipment, and whatever else would fit. Word got round that a doctor was there. People came to the roadside one at a time and his father saw them where they stood, and when he was done he told them he would be back tomorrow and went to play with his children.
He became a kidney doctor. When his sickest patients crashed, the intensive care team was called, and he watched how they worked. Then he went and trained as one of them.”
Better.
I sent it to him for approval. He emailed back the same afternoon to ask whether his father could go further down, since his colleagues would read the page too.
He had a point, and I nearly gave in to it. A consultant sending him a patient wants the accreditation in the first line. And plenty of bios already carry a version of his father. The sentence is usually something like “medicine runs in the family”, and patients learned to skip it long ago.
That sentence asks to be believed. The bag only has to be seen. Had this been the page Noura opened at 11, she would have known where the man sitting across the desk from her father learned his medicine. He learned it from someone who stopped at the side of the road.
She would have trusted him before they met, and a daughter who trusts a doctor tells him about the tablet her father stopped taking in March. Everything after that goes more easily for all three of them.
So the accreditation stayed on the page, one paragraph below the bag. A colleague will scroll for it. A patient’s daughter reading at night will not get past the third line.
Every doctor I have researched has told a story like his somewhere. It turns up in a podcast, on an alumni page, in the last sentence of a clinic bio, in something a local paper printed ten years ago. Hardly any of them open their own page with it. Most of my work on a profile is finding that story and carrying it to the top.
If you run a clinic, search one of your doctors. Go past the hospital listing, past the first page of results, and keep going until you find him talking about something other than his training. It is usually there.
Noura read the old page, with the accreditation on top. Her father sees him on Thursday, a man she chose for the parking, and somewhere in the first few minutes she will decide whether to tell him about the tablet.
Noura, her father, the first bio and the email are invented. The anaesthetist in Malawi, the bag and the roadside are real. They open a profile I wrote of a kidney consultant, from a recorded interview.
Second Draft is a series on the writing healthcare actually publishes, taken apart one specimen at a time. Every specimen here was written by me; no clinic’s copy appears here.
I write patient pages and physician profiles for clinics, reviewed by their clinicians before they go live.