We recently had another visit from Barack Obama to the San Francisco Bay area. However, rather than sampling the delights of the city, the President drove south down route 101 to Palo Alto and the headquarters of Facebook. The President was the guest of honor at a “town hall event” moderated by Facebook CEO Mark […]
Category: Columnists
Martin McShane: The calm
As a child I remember standing on a beach and marvelling at how unnaturally still and calm everything seemed. It was a few hours before a hurricane hit the coast. The financial year has been accounted for – literally. The finance team worked seven day weeks to complete all the work that was necessary and […]
Richard Smith: Waiting for Putin
Along with about 600 other people, 90 of them health ministers from all over the world, I spent two hours recently waiting for Vladimir Putin, prime minister of the Russian Federation, to arrive at a meeting in Moscow. It was dull but did give us “NCD nuts” a chance to catch up with each other and […]
Sandra Lako: World Malaria Day in Sierra Leone
World Malaria Day was this week and unfortunately, although a preventable disease, malaria still kills many people in the developing world. At the children’s hospital I work at, we see malaria cases everyday. Some cases are very severe; the children are literally on death’s doorstep and other cases are mild and improve with oral medication. […]
Tracey Koehlmoos on open versus free access: lesson learnt
Out of the blue on 28 March my colleagues and I received notification that all Lancet journals are now available to everyone in Bangladesh. As you can imagine, this is excellent news for those of us who like to read the Lancet so that it did feel a little like Christmas especially for the systematic review […]
Muir Gray: Japan, a little good news
I have been to Japan on a number of occasions and learned a great deal from the people I have met there, and from what I have read. […]
Douglas Noble on the fragmentation of public health
Talk to almost any public health specialist and they’ll express their biggest concern about the current NHS reforms in England as fragmentation of the public health service. To understand why fragmentation is a bad thing, we first need to know what it is that could be broken up. Public health has traditionally consisted of three main domains […]
Tiago Villanueva: National health services are a great thing, particularly in times of financial austerity
Looking at my country’s national health service which is chiefly funded by taxes, from a user’s rather than from a provider’s perspective (or better, from a passive rather than from an active perspective), gives me plenty of food for thought. A relative of mine was recently admitted to the local hospital in very serious condition. They had not […]
Martin McShane: Evolution or revolution?
The announcement of a pause in the progress of the legislative process has been serendipitous for me. It coincided with a series of events where I could listen to a variety of interesting people offering their take on the reforms. The rap, which thousands have watched, even in America, was referenced on numerous occasions. It […]
David Kerr: Twitterology
The NHS is in love with the airline industry. The idea of checklists before operations has really caught on, and increasingly ex-airline people are being placed in advisory roles for a variety of NHS organizations. Hospitals are especially envious of the ability of the airlines to develop and use technology that allows hundreds of random […]