• health services research
• data collection

I’ve read a few spy novels in my time. I don’t think I’d cause much controversy if I put forward the view that John le Carré is perhaps the finest author in the genre. There are very many interesting things that happen in his riveting, multi-layered stories, but there’s one I want to focus on here. This is what happens when somebody defects—changes side. There’s a complex, rigorous and sometimes harrowing process where the defector is questioned in immense depth to extract the maximum possible information from them. There’s a similar process after one of their own spies returns from fieldwork, or after some major event. The word used to describe this process is ‘debrief’. Isn’t it very odd that we use the same word to describe what …