COMMUNICATION UNDER PRESSURE

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A weekly newsletter on high-stakes communication — drawn from 27 years in operating theatres, military medicine, and hospital leadership. One story. One pattern. One thing you'll use. 

 

Each piece below began as a newsletter issue — and earned a permanent home here.
HELPS — H: "I Need Help" The Most Underused Phrase in Medicine
2026-07-01 10:54 She had her hand on the needle for the fourth time when she finally said the only thing that mattered. "I need help."   It was Doctors' Day last year when I started thinking about what we actually ...
I Told You Sukhi's Story. I Wasn't Ready to Tell You All of It.
2026-05-13 09:39 I told you Sukhi's story. I wasn't ready to tell you all of it. One soldier. Eight communication failures. One framework that could have prevented every one of them.
Not Documented. Not Done.
2026-05-05 14:01 A postoperative patient. A missing chart. And a piece of technology that changed everything — but couldn't answer the one question that mattered most.
How a Stuffed Toy Changed Every Paediatric Case That Came After
2026-04-27 20:49 How a Stuffed Toy Changed Every Paediatric Case That Came After E — Examine The Habit That Turns Experience Into Learning   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Appu was a stuffed toy elephant. Ab...
The Phrase That Bought Us Three Minutes
2026-04-21 23:08 One sentence bought us three minutes. Here is what it taught me about communication under pressure.
Niladri Kumar-SITAR
2026-04-17 23:09 NILADRI KUMAR ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Twenty years ago I sat in a concert hall and heard Pt Niladri Kumar play. Last weekend I sat in a concert hall and hear...