Tobacco companies clearly cause harm, and we will always need food companies. But what about alcohol companies? Can they produce net benefit? I’ve been pondering this question for three decades, but it’s a live issue for governments who must decide whether to include alcohol companies in programmes to reduce harm from alcohol and also for organisations, like […]
Earlier this week I attended a lunch in an expensive London restaurant where a motley collection of people discussed what to do about binge drinking. Alcohol was served, but I felt duty bound to decline (and I was cycling). The lunch was sponsored by an alcohol company, and they must have been well pleased with […]
For the past two months I have been trying to find somebody to speak in in favour of mammography in a debate, but I have failed. Some six people have turned me down. Why, I wonder? […]
Back in May 2010 the professional executive committee and NHS Lincolnshire board agreed to delegate the management of the minor surgery local enhanced service to the practice based commissioning (PBC) Groups. A lot of discussion and analysis had taken place prior to this decision. Practices had said that the historical budget was insufficient to meet […]
The latest world record for the most number of tweets being sent on a single topic is now held by the Women’s World Cup football final earlier in July this year. Apparently this particular match generated 7196 tweets per second (TPS) with even Barack Obama joining in. Other recent notable world events on Twitter include the […]
The publication of the Government response to the value based pricing consultation provides some further insight into current thinking. 188 responses are summarised to the 20 questions posed in the consultation, along with the Department of Health response to each. Of the 20 questions, seven asked yes/no questions along the lines of do you agree that X […]
A compelling piece in the Economist argues that social media are returning news to the “more vibrant, freewheeling, and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era” and that newspapers will prove to have been a historical aberration. The same, I think, will be true of scientific journals. […]
As part of the development of our Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) the seven GP CCG chairs now have a place at the NHS Lincolnshire Board meetings. The agenda was not particularly unusual. We were required to approve the Equality and Diversity Strategy. We had a couple of papers dealing with our legacy document and the […]
I am writing to you not from Bangladesh but rather from the Institute of Medicine’s workshop on country-level decision making for control of chronic diseases being held from 19-21 July at the House of Sweden in Washington, DC. On Wednesday I presented on “data availability and gaps in Bangladesh,” which I worked very hard to make […]
It is a sure sign of the ever diminishing pool of memorable acronyms that even the most treasured of ceremonial events can be hijacked for the basest of clinical motives. In recent years, a prominent casualty was one of the highlights of the British cultural summer, the Proms. Rather than a magnificent series of concerts […]