This month marks the first anniversary of Jess’s Rule: three strikes and we rethink. The principle is simple and easy to remember — if a patient presents three times with unexplained, persistent or escalating symptoms, that’s the trigger to stop, step back and critically re-evaluate the diagnosis, rather than treating the third visit the same as the first two.
A year in, it’s worth asking honestly how embedded this actually is in day-to-day practice, rather than assuming it’s just “known about” because it was rolled out twelve months ago. Reflect-Review-Rethink only works as a safety net if it’s a habit every clinician reaches for automatically at that third presentation, not something remembered occasionally when a case feels unusual.
Posters for consultation rooms are available from the Campaign Resource Centre, designed to keep Reflect-Review-Rethink visible at the point it matters — during the consultation itself, not buried in an induction pack from a year ago.
Worth doing now: check whether your consultation rooms actually have the posters up, ask your clinical team how familiar they are with the three-strikes principle a year on, and consider whether it’s worth a short refresher at your next clinical meeting rather than assuming it’s stuck.