Using simply age to screen for cardiovascular disease is as effective as more complicated methods using blood pressure and serum cholesterol, concludes a study published in PloS One in May by Nick Wald, Mark Simmonds, and Joan Morris. (1) Can this really be right and if so what does it mean? The authors used a Monte […]
There are now two groups of people living with chronic disease, those that are connected and those who are not. In days gone by, “being connected” meant having personal and professional contacts in all of the right places to further an idea, career, or relationship. Being connected nowadays, however, means something completely different – owning […]
Mental health disorders—particularly depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease—account for a huge proportion of the global burden of disease, but the outlook for better treatments looks bleak. I don’t think that was the message I was supposed to get from a conference entitled Making Sense of Mental Illness organised by EMBO at the European Molecular Biology […]
During the years when the Book of Revelations was being laid down, some time apparently in the first century AD, human populations were likely, with some exceptions, to be small, imperilled, and surrounded by a seemingly infinite planet. Officially at least, on October the 31st this year the population of the earth reached seven billion. […]
I was privileged to be invited to the patient experience seminar being held as part of the Mid Staffordshire enquiry. I felt as though I was participating in one of the best development sessions I have experienced as a clinician and manager. The morning was filled with three excellent presentations. First up was Paul Hodgkin […]
The economic downturn has given us all a crash course in the arcane language of economics. A fine example is “quantitative easing,” a sober and serious sounding euphemism for the unnerving practice of governments printing money to spend their way out of a hole. While it may make sense in the short term, it dilutes […]
Can we imagine a world 20 years from now that no longer has health professionals? Instead of regulated health professionals anybody could offer healthcare—and perhaps much of it would be healthcare rather than sickness care. Patients with diabetes might offer care to other patients, and robots with superior technology might provide round the clock not […]
While I was a partner in general practice, we started to receive information about how we were performing compared to other practices. Whatever the data, we always looked at how we benchmarked against one particular practice. It was about the same size as ours, not far away (so serving the same sort of population), and we […]
¡Hola! from Madrid where the 19th Cochrane Colloquium was hosted last week by the IberoAmerican Cochrane Centre. The theme of this year’s meeting was “scientific evidence for healthcare quality and patient safety.” As all of us – at one time or another – are patients of the healthcare system, the synthesis of interventions to reduce adverse […]
Last week I left the 30ºC heat of Lisbon for the almost sub-zero temperatures of Krakow, and made premature use of my winter gear. But the cold was not enough to deter me from attending one of my favourite conferences, the biannual meeting of the European general practice research network, which gathers dozens of people interested and involved in primary […]