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The rising costs of healthcare are well documented, and the list of contributory factors well established (and very familiar to anyone who has recently interviewed medical students). In the UK, the government’s ‘left shift’ approach—focusing on prevention over cure, and care in the community rather than in hospital—aims to tackle some of these. Similarly, applying evidence-based clinical guidelines aims to avoid unnecessary investigations and reduce unwarranted variation in healthcare, which may be geographical or socio-economic. Nevertheless, pressures on health services everywhere continue to increase, and in this climate, we have a collective responsibility to make every effort to avoid the misuse of the limited resources at our disposal.