Without diluting the clinician’s traditional commitment to the individual patient, the clinical community also has a broader responsibility to the community that provides the resources for health services. The new responsibilities of clinicians in the 21st century are for: […]
Category: Columnists
Tiago Villanueva: Financial austerity and health in Portugal
Financial austerity in Europe has been a hot topic in the news lately. But the spotlight in Europe over the past few weeks has definitely been on a small and overlooked European country that is considered peripheral. Portugal, buried in debt, has just followed in the steps of Greece and Ireland by becoming the next country to […]
Richard Smith: Review of “bring back browsing”
Although I bemoan prepublication peer review, I do a fair bit of reviewing. I’m never quite sure why, but it’s probably that I’m still insufficiently practised at saying no. I reviewed for the BMJ Jerry Kassirer’s article published last week in which he regrets that young doctors don’t browse more. I wasn’t greatly impressed, and […]
Martin McShane: Consciously unconscious
I was in a meeting last week with the seven chairs of the new consortia, two other executives from the new PCT cluster, and an external consultant who was giving an independent overview of the context and the challenges, and how they might be jointly and severally addressed. The content and debate was engaging and […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Non-communicable diseases and bringing the fishbowl to Bangladesh
I am not going to lie. I love planning conferences and meetings although as a serious scientist, I do not think I am supposed to think and feel this way, but I do. Why? As my Hirsch score indicates, I spend a lot of time writing papers that no one reads except for the editors […]
Richard Smith: What is post publication peer review?
I’ve been tramping from stage to stage arguing that pre publication peer is slow, expensive ($1.8 billion a year), ineffective, biased, and anti-innovatory and should be dumped in favour of post-publication peer review. But what do I mean by post publication peer review? Despite my best efforts, which are clearly not good enough, people are […]
Martin McShane: Patients as customers
Sometimes you get a sense of cultural change: someone tells you a story and simultaneously you think “that’s a good idea” and “times they are a changin’.” […]
David Kerr: Angry bird medicine
“I want this company to be bigger than Sanofi-Aventis in ten years time” was the opening line from a (successful) entrepreneur I met the other day. He might be right given the resources being poured into creating technology for the healthcare market here in Silicon Valley these days. The concept is straightforward – choose a […]
Sandra Lako: Oxygen for the feeding centre
Last week Monday the final four oxygen concentrators from the “Operation Oxygen” campaign made it to Ola During Children’s Hospital. Thanks to all of you who contributed generously to this campaign. Of course, it was a bit of an epic journey to get the shipment from the airport to the hospital, but after many phone […]
Richard Smith: Might copies of PLoS ONE change journals forever?
I continue to be amazed that despite the appearance of the internet, which some have compared with the invention of fire, our methods for disseminating scientific studies are essentially the same as they were 50 years ago. We still have journals, and, although papers have electronic versions, those papers are indistinguishable from those of 50 […]