Even though my clinical life is enmeshed with an active arts and health programme with music in pole position –a composer in residence in the Stroke Unit and a hospital residency by a chamber orchestra – taking part in a three day musicology conference dedicated to the late music of Schubert seemed hugely daunting at […]
Category: Columnists
Richard Smith: “End of the world” and the under 40s
The BMJ meeting on climate change keeps reverberating through my mind, and the apocalyptic feel of the meeting was deeply unsettling. Is the end of the world nigh? And what does that mean for those under 40? People have been predicting “the end of the world” ever since there has been a written historical record, […]
Martin McShane: Care and cure
We are coming up to the annual contracting round. This year it will be led by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). Last year GPs were involved in the difficult, detailed negotiations with the acute sector alongside PCT staff. As one of them said, emerging into daylight, somewhat pale and drained, “I never realised how hard it […]
Richard Smith: Climate change, torturers, Nero, and me
“We know what we need to do to avoid severe climate change. We know how to get it done. We have the technology, and we can afford it. But we don’t have the political will.” That’s the message I remember most clearly from the BMJ’s conference on climate change, and sadly as a human being […]
Julian Sheather: Apocalypse tomorrow
There are four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine (or pestilence) and death, and climate change will unleash all of them. I was at a BMJ conference recently that explored some of the health and security impacts of climate change and these grim riders were everywhere to be seen. Put simply, climate change will […]
David Kerr: Twitterrors – how not to communicate using social media
Medicine is an art more than a science and the canvas is communication. This week the UK supermarket giant Asda announced that it would no longer stock landline telephones as they are becoming as obsolete as white coats and necks ties for hospital doctors. According to one Asda mobile buyer “standing in one place to […]
David Kerr: Loose lips sink ships
Loose lips sink ships was coined as a slogan during WWII as part of the US Office of War Information’s attempt to limit the possibility of people inadvertently giving useful information to enemy spies. Unguarded comments by healthcare professionals hit the headlines in recent weeks after medics were reprimanded for using derogatory terms about hospital […]
Martin McShane: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
There are about 38,000 primary care contracts. They are worth over £12 billion. All of them are going to be the responsibility of the National Commissioning Board. By 2013 every PCT cluster will have had to scrutinise every contract, blow the dust off the ones that no one has looked at in years, and make sure they are […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: You are invited—and a thank you
It is hard to follow up from my last blog about the Colonel’s unexpected death on the streets of Jakarta so rather than charging into a vaguely academic or policy related blog, I want to pause and give thanks. Thank you to everyone who posted a comment to the blog for your willingness to so […]
Douglas Noble on vaccinating doctors
As I lay in Regents Park on Saturday 1 October showing my one year old daughter the falling autumnal leaves and conkers it hardly felt like winter was approaching. Not least because it was thirty degrees Celsius, and there was more ice cream on sale than climate change proponents could swallow. Yet, winter is on the way and unofficial […]