When I qualified as a doctor in 1993, trolley medicine was completely routine. Post take ward rounds would typically visit people who had been waiting patiently in corridors overnight or longer. I’m ashamed to say it never occurred to me to think of this as a “crisis”—it was just the way things were. The cause […]
It would have been Steve Biko’s seventieth birthday this weekend. The anti-apartheid leader was beaten to death by the South African Police in a jail cell in 1977. His death was a medical scandal too—doctors acquiesced in his being driven, semi-conscious and chained, the 700 miles from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. Developing his program of […]
The Thames is wreathed in smog—the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, issues an air quality alert and announces a new system of air quality warnings. There will be road-side dot matrix message signs on the busiest main roads into London, with instructions to switch engines off when stationary to reduce emissions. Air quality messages will […]
“I am furious, sad, and scared for the NHS” —Margaret McCartney’s opening words in the introduction to her latest, timely book, The State of Medicine (Pinter and Martin 2016). Understandable sentiments, as the NHS heads for £20 billion/year underfunding by 2020 and politicians can launch thinly veiled xenophobic attacks on our colleagues born overseas. McCartney’s writing […]
Cato the Elder is said to have concluded every speech he made in the Roman Senate, regardless of the topic, with “Delenda est Carthago”—Carthage must be destroyed. In answering the Editor of The BMJ’s call for ideas on how the medical profession can protest against the destruction of the NHS, a similar clarity and consistency […]
A study this week from the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research at the University of Edinburgh, widely reported in the media, estimates that asthma costs the UK £1.1 billion/year in direct healthcare and disability allowance payments. News reports focused on the scale of these costs and the suggestion that 1100 people are dying “needlessly” each […]
The price good people pay for not engaging in politics is bad government. I prefer this version of Plato’s aphorism to the more usual “rule by your inferiors” one. The guiding ethical principle should not be one’s position within a hierarchy, but rather that society should be fair and reasonable; organised in a way that […]