Week 29: DNR decisions, conscious competence and prototyping

An absolute beauty of a restaurant in Mallorca

The same old problem with DNR decisions

We released a report last week which showed medics are still really bad at communicating DNR (do not resuscitate) decisions. It’s pretty depressing reading, as it seems not much has changed since we released our last report during the pandemic. We’re still seeing the same failures around communication and knowledge of the law. The results are equally distressing for people and their relatives.

It’s timely, as I’ve applied for a Churchill Fellowship to look into what we can learn from other countries. I’m on an interview waitlist so I’m trying to not get too invested in the idea. I am excited though by the prospect of seeing how other nationalities and cultures deal with this problem as we just have not cracked it here in the UK.

Am I unconsciously competent?

We had a supervision session this week where someone mentioned this concept of ‘conscious competence’. I found it fascinating - I’ve not given much thought about competence in terms of consciousness, but it absolutely makes sense to me now I’ve thought about it. It was raised in relation to how confident we feel answering our helpline calls. Confidence or in other words competence with the knowledge which helps us support people varies, and we talked about how you can be unconsciously competent. You may feel like you don’t know enough, but actually you know plenty. Yes, always room for improvement but essentially don’t sell yourself short?

I then chuckled about the scarier view that I’m maybe consciously incompetent…

In the same meeting someone made a cracking analogy in relation to being a passenger in a car. Similarly related to the idea of being confident to answer our helpline calls, the analogy was how being a passenger in a car doesn’t necessarily mean you learn the roads and how to navigate… you actually need to be driving. Similarly, you may hear lots of phonecalls happening around you (the passenger) but actually being the person answering the calls is a whole other thing. Great analogy.

Having fun with protoyping

We’re at the stage of testing our content on best interests decisions and so came to a familiar challenge of how best to prototype our content. In my last weeknote I mentioned we’re looking at trying the step-by-step pattern from the GOV.UK Design System to present options to our users. Because of this, I thought I’d have a crack at using the GOV.UK Prototype Kit to mock-up our page.

After a lot of trial and error, and some quite frankly educated (clueless) hacking around in multiple guides and websites we ended up with something pretty decent and we’re taking it into testing.

Our protoype webpage

Other things…

I had a lovely weekend away in Mallorca. I ate some King fish!? Never heard of it, but turns out it’s the tastiest fish I’ve ever eaten. Also saw a dolphin and went on a hike.

Lovely hike

Breakfast