“Remember Graves, the waste paper basket is always your best friend”
So said Robert Graves’s housemaster when he discovered Robert Graves was writing poetry. As I grow older I also think the waste paper basket is my best friend. (And I fantasise about sending Darzi down the Khazi…but maybe I shouldn’t.)Dr Rant has an overdeveloped internal crap detector, and loves getting rid of crap in all its forms. He thinks the shredder is the greatest invention of the last 100 years. Anyway some crap arrived today and although it’s crap, it’s all grist to the ranter. Be assured this merely delayed its journey to the bin by a few seconds.
The crap this time was a silly survey from some academic centre of excellence (click on survey to enlarge). It had everything about it guaranteed to get a busy GP offside and wanting to throw it with force into the bin. It wasn’t actually the subject of the survey that was the problem- that was valid enough. It was the phrasing of the intro letter that annoyed me.Academics amaze me. They seem to have no idea about how little we care for their pet projects, their current theories. Nor do they quite realise how dissociated they are from reality of NHS general practice. So when they write assuming that their projects matter to me they assume rather too much.
It was a very busy day at the Ranting House. I did not have a spare ten minutes, and even if I did I was not going to use it on this survey. It has everything in its approach that actually illustrates lack of understanding and indeed a lack of politeness to busy people.
“You are being invited” as I am several times a week by too many people. It doesn’t make me feel special.
“We realise that answering this survey will take some time (10 minutes)” I may or may not be willing to give this. Time management is about priorities, not minutes, and this wasn’t about to become my priority because...
“However it is vital” Oh no, it isn’t. At least not to me it’s not. It might be to someone, but it’s probably only to some academic who wants to get his papers published.
“in a peer reviewed medical journal” I do hope I get to review this one! Dr Rant regularly peer reviews papers for various journals. I’ll pay close attention to the response rate. And Carey Cardigan is not really representative of his profession.
“we greatly value your opinion” No you don’t- you’ll take the answers and put whatever spin you were going to put on them anyway. Insurance companies value my knowledge properly…and pay for it. A £10 M+S voucher would have helped…and the project was Pharma sponsored.
"A charitable donation to Depression Alliance for every completed questionnaire"
But this is not my favourite charity, and it's one of those silly campaigns with no obvious enemy. Where's the pro depression campaign that opposes it?
I can give my opinion for free any day I want. This blog is rather good evidence of that!
Actually if they had sent the survey and said “Please help us” I would have been more inclined to say, “yes.” If they had not said “It is vital” I would have been more sympathetic.
They broke rapport because they focused on what was vital to them (to get lots of responses) rather than on what was vital to me (getting through the day). This broke rapport and left me feeling that the survey mattered a whole lot more to them than it did to me.
So it went straight into the bin. Aren’t time management skills wonderful?
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22 comments:
" we greatly value your opinion"
:-) What else can they say Dr Rant?! Research is important and does make a difference. Your, and other GPs, participation is 'vital' if it is to get any valid results. That a researcher will benefit from your participation, good for them, this is just economics. What goes round, comes round.
Not everybody can write English as well as you do ;-) and I know for a fact that you have a big heart. I am sure you can accommodate those poor, hard working academics too. Team work, remember :-)
I am frankly on the side of Dr Rant. Academics may be clever blokes (aand blokesses), but they don't live in the real world. I always filed under "W"...
Where's the pro depression campaign that opposes it?
where are the pro-cancer, pro heart-disease, pro-child neglect, pro-elder abuse campaigns that oppose those charities' aims?
(Mskes note to join MIND and Depression Alliance Wales asap and to continue to donate to the unfashionable charities -- including http://www.torturecare.org.uk/ -- in the time left over from reading up on my symptoms to work out whether I'm sufficiently severely ill to make a humble request for a GP appointment.)
elaine, check doctor's pay then check academic salaries: you'll find out who lives in the 'real world'.
sorry, that was me (Blogger seems to have gone haywire)
Oops
that should of course be 'check doctors' pay'
Dr Rant, you did not even touch on the stupidity of calling the project 'NAPSAQ'. I get particularly pissed off when academics twist acronyms into 'nu txt' language. I would be far more willing to respond to 'NPSAQ' than to 'knapsack'.
ejits.
I'm also with Dr Rant on this one and I'd disagree with Sam. I don't think that a survey is vital and to use this word with medics is provocative. Vital means necessary for life, like "vital signs" which, if they're absent, aren't good ;-)
As soon as they're saying it's of such critical importance that life is extinguished if it doesn't take place (which is what "vital" should mean) they've moved from dispassionate research to spin/marketting a survey and, instantly, they've lost me too.
As I binned mine this morning, I thought of you!
Ah matt!, where have you been? You OK?
The survey, people, is probably a contribution to an attempt to do well in the next, and last, RAE exercise -- in which medical schools are included, I think. On the one hand, you should bin it because of the shameful way in which universities have given in to all the targets, bullying some of their staff in the process. On the other hand, you should not bin it, because of the possible fate of non-target-meeting staff.
the shrink, you're fooling around!
Thanks for the reference 'the shrink', one of the definitions is::
'affecting the existence, well-being, truth, etc., of something'
My point is valid then, no spin intended, I was merely giving my opinion based on 'my' belief that research is 'vital' in the way 'your' dictionary link describes.
Jayann i think you will find that medical academics doing drug company sponsored trials earn pretty well. Not many do it as their only job.
Reffer to the consultant citing reverse racism as the reason he did not get a Platinum award...he did quite a few trials and published over 100 peer reviewed papers.
Hi jayann,
I've been lurking.
funny pseudonym wrote:
Jayann i think you will find that medical academics doing drug company sponsored trials earn pretty well. Not many do it as their only job.
Do you think Dr Rant would have been more sympathetic if the letter had come from an underpaid non-clinical academic, FP? I wonder. I'm with Jayann when it comes to the differences between clinical and non-clinical academics 'and researchers' pay.
I think this survey suffered from a poorly written opening letter. It didn't tell me why the survey mattered to me, patients or the researcher, yet it was still "vital."
Basically this one had a losing sales pitch. Easy to bin.
:-)
is dr C ok?
no one
Speaking as someone who has been involved in two or three questionnaire-based survey things, Dr Rant does have a point about the stilted and slightly lame language. If they want you to help them with their study, agreed they should "ask you to help them etc etc." - and they should explain what they are really going to do with it - i.e. publish a study. And they should explain why the question is worth answering and might ultimately make some difference to to Dr Rant and his punters.
I can believe GPs would be hard to survey this way in the sense that you have no way of targetting those with any particular interest in the topic. Easier with things where you want particular people's view (specialists in X Y Z) as they are, I suspect, more likely to enjoy "venting" or opinionating on their personal area of interest.
The last thing I did at all like this I lobbied hard to put in "if you are not interested in helping but know someone locally who might be please pass it along" - or similar, which did seem to help.
Of course, there must be loads of routinely collected data which could be used to get at the same things, which I guess is another reason Dr Rant is likely to tell the survey-ers to bog off. Although these days one can never be terribly sure the Dept of Whatever would give researchers unfettered access to potentially embarrassing data.
You posed a hypothetical question phd scientist, then answered it yourself :-) ... and, if Dr Rant throws researchers requests to the bin because he doesn't like the covering letter, with 0 increase in his pay this year, I can hardly see him parting with the price of the stamp to forward them anywhere, let alsone to someone who knows more about the research topic.
Poor, poor academia and academics!
matt so you're OK -- good.
I assumed it came from a non-clinical academic, funny pseudonym, or a full-time researcher. A clinical academic would be subject to the RAE too, but phd scientist is right about my views on the pay differentials.
But of course we can find out who's doing the study (unless whoever wrote the letter's lying), and indeed I'm reading their web page now.
Dr rant, is 'rantingshire' a Freudian slip?
Dear doctor X
Please would you take the time (approx 10 mins) to complete this questionnaire. We are surveying (GPs/patients/psychiatrists) about X. This is because we hope, if we find out more about Y and Z in depression, that we may be able to assist in (more efficiently targeting resources/increasing the sum knowledge about depression/ASSISTING THE COMPANY THAT IS SPONSORING US TO MARKET THEIR DRUG MORE EFFECTIVELY.
The first part of the above is the way to approach anyone you wnat to do something for you. The last part is why GPs are so suspicious.
All that will come out of this study is drug company marketing, and if they don't like the resulst they will squash the data.
Tell me again why that's a valuable use of 10 minutes of my time?
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