Helen MacDonald

I have a very small brain circuit between my thoughts and my mouth.

And the word quiet did used to come out of my mouth quite a lot.

So this looks at whether saying the word quiet out loud increases your clinical workload.

And this is done by a rather glorious collection of lab clinicians.

And a secondary aim of this paper was

which is nonetheless very important, is to answer the question, what does a medical microbiologist actually do?

Do you?

Well, we're not going to throw this paper out based on that, Karl.

I'm continuing.

So these microbiologists did a randomized study in their unit, and they either said, today will be a quiet day,

Or they had to avoid making such statements.

And over the course of a couple of months, they measured their clinical workload, their clinical episodes, which are basically calls for advice, probably from people like you in urgent care, and the number of results that needed action.

And they found that they had about five more clinical episodes of care a day on the days when they said today is going to be a quiet day.

But this didn't reach their meaningful difference in workload, which they said would be more than 30 jobs.

So they concluded that actually we can all say quiet safely.

Does that convince you?

Would you utter it in your urgent care centre, Carl, based on this study?

Mmm, you're getting a bit un-Christmassy and screechy.

Oh, yes, it's good.

This was my favourite paper of the year.