A meeting of the Southampton Medical Society was held on the 4th October 2023.
The President was in the chair. The minutes of the last meeting were approved.
The President introduced our speaker, Dr Iain Macintosh, consultant anaesthetist in PICU Southampton University Hospital, who spoke to the title ‘Bias, Prognosis and Interventions’. He asked, why study the process of decision making in science, when it is something we do all the time? It is algorithm driven. But medical decision making is full of shortcuts exposing the possibility of confirmation bias. He discussed Gerd Gigerenzer’s work on Ecological Rationality and explored with “illness scripts” how people can be good decision makers by using simple heuristics but there is always a risk of bad decisions. At birth, Dr Mackintosh said, the gestational age of an infant is 100% important but as it gets older it becomes less so. He had created a questionnaire of 26 scenarios relating to the management of infants from 23 weeks to 30 months in PICUs and asked how using ecological rationality and heuristics might affect the clinical outcomes. He sent the questionnaire out to 278 PICU consultants and received 74 replies with a variety of responses which he discussed.
Dr Mackintosh then invited comments from the audience. A discussion ensued covering a variety of clinical situations including the role of AI.
The President thanked Dr Macintosh for such a stimulating evening.