When is a good idea truly revolutionary? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a game-changer as ‘an event, idea, or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current way of doing or thinking about something’.
If you came back to medicine after a sleep of – let’s say 10 years – you’d find some crucial aspect of practice had changed in a way you would not have predicted. All your colleagues would be thinking differently. You would be obliged to learn to do things differently.
I recently wrote about self-refracting spectacles. They were an innovative idea for patients with acuity problems in poor countries, bypassing the need for refraction by scarce optometrists before glasses can be prescribed. But they haven’t caught on.