What follows is an email debate between Melanie Lovell, a palliative care physician in Sydney, and Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and chair of Patients Know Best. The debate began when Richard asked if Melanie had seen the editorial that he had written with two colleagues arguing that we need to take a […]
We are now constantly discussing the transition process and the programme of work we have mapped, which we need to follow to deliver the structural changes demanded by the reforms. This sits alongside the planning process, with the plan for 2012/13 shuttling back and forth between the SHA, PCT cluster, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), various […]
Tomorrow I’m running a workshop for medical students at Imperial College London on medical journalism, and I thought it essential to include something on using and enjoying social media. I imagined that I would find dozens of guides on the web, but to my surprise I couldn’t find anything satisfactory. And much of what I […]
This month we published a report on risk of type two diabetes in East London, with an accompanying paper in BMJ Open, and underpinned by a previous systematic review in BMJ. We took a risk scoring algorithm, the QDScore, and used it on just over half a million electronic records to identify high risk groups. […]
Recently I had the privilege of talking with the members of an emerging clinical commissioning group (CCG). (For those who don’t know, CCGs are groups of GPs who will have responsibility for commissioning care for a whole population.) It was my job to try and lift the conversation above governance, finance, and the future of […]
Ach, what a furore. The Daily Telegraph is in its element and having a ball printing nasty allegations about doctors doing abortions illegally on grounds of sex selection. Let’s look at the issues a bit more dispassionately. First, is it actually illegal? Yes and no. The 1967 Abortion Act does not permit abortion on grounds […]
“I’m afraid I’m currently out of the office right now on the never-ending mission to restore world health—I am very interested in your message and will endeavour to reply to it as soon as I am back.” This rather immodest response to my request to sign up to a new soon-to-be launched on-line game (http://www.syrum-game.com) […]
When I first met Andrew Wilner, an American physician, a few years ago, it was the first time I had heard of the word “neurohospitalist.” I obviously knew what a neurologist or a neurosurgeon are, but a neurohospitalist was an absolute novelty, and I have a feeling it is not a well known role in […]
I became interested in commissioning through Fundholding. Like the majority of GP practices that got involved we did so because we wanted to improve the experience and the services our patients received. We used the influence which holding a budget gave us to address quality. For example, we improved the safety of anticoagulation management, we […]
Systematic reviews have something of an image problem. To the uninitiated, they can be considered too effete because they run on for hundreds of pages, with lots of forest plots and risk of bias calculations. And what is a GRADE table? I know that I generally head straight for the conclusion section of the abstract—does […]