1. Welcome to critical.

Hello, and welcome to critical. This is the new home for a collection of all my different medical writings, bringing together a number of previous projects. Recently, looking at my educational and medical writing work I realised that it was scattered across a number of different websites. Whilst I enjoy doing these projects, I have found it very difficult to maintain momentum whilst they were so widely spread. I found myself moving from one to another, with some getting almost abandoned. As such I decided that it was probably best to consolidate them altogether in one single place - hence the project that we have here: critical.

Firstly, I have housed this on my principal website, The Gasman Handbook, which was a collection of all my clinical notes on different topics in anaesthesia and intensive care. This is my biggest project and my most active, and I think the one that people find the most useful. All of these notes are still available here. However, I've also brought in some additional previous projects, including this blog. One of my earliest endeavours in this field was my blog at Rapid Sequence where I went to discuss and dissect the medical literature on different topics. This was in the early days of my training and it was particularly fun to look at the evidence base for different themes that I came across week by week. Recent reflections made me notice how I had completely stopped this practice, instead directing my non-educational writing to other topics, principally outside of medicine. It made me realise how much I missed this critical appraisal and general active discourse with the latest papers and themes. I really wanted to kick start this again and that was a major driver for bringing it back into a single place. That is what the critical blog will principally be about. That is, looking at new papers that are released, discussing them, and bringing out valuable educational lessons. I hope that this goes beyond critical appraisal, and includes the various challenges of translating research and ideas into actual clinical practice. It is these conversations which I often find the most interesting and which I hope can find a place here. 

Finally, my very first project was in creating educational videos almost entirely on medical physiology. Whilst that transitioned into the Gasman Handbook and a more clinical focus I'm still keen to continue making such ‘basic science’ resources for people to use. However, all of this rests on interaction with the people that use this website and I am very grateful for the large numbers of those that do. I hope that the new format can create an increased degree of interactivity and I really do enjoy hearing about your experiences using it, including what works and what doesn’t. As such, please feel encouraged to post comments and ask questions here in the blog. Also please consider following me on Bluesky and Youtube as DrTomHeaton, and let me know about topics that you would like to see covered in more detail. I'm looking forward to the coming weeks of this new direction.