A dangerous phrase I’ve heard on a ward round is, “Let’s wait for the morning bloods before we decide.”
I sat in a Gold Command meeting in January 2021 as Chief Medical Officer for an NHS system of 1.5 million people. We had no NICE guidelines, no randomised controlled trials, and no precedent. A senior clinician looked at the electronic whiteboard mapping our critical care capacity and said, “We don’t have enough evidence to cancel urgent surgery yet.” By the time we had the undeniable evidence, the ICU would have been completely overrun. That hesitation isn’t caution; it is paralysis masquerading as clinical rigour.
