Last Sunday it seemed like the whole of Silicon Valley stopped work to watch the Oscars (on-line of course) otherwise known as the 83rd Academy Awards. Overall, the impression was that it was a pretty limp affair with only one F-word, robotic presenters, and bland acceptance speeches. The botoxed fashionistas were particularly scathing about the […]
Category: Columnists
Muir Gray: Bye Bye Quality
The nasal tones of the Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love, Hello Loneliness” are very familiar to people who were young in the fifties and healthcare now faces a similar paradigm shift from quality to value — Bye Bye Quality, Hello Value. The debate is sharpest in the United States because healthcare is the battleground of that republic. There are […]
Tiago Villanueva: GPs are specialists too
In Portugal, general practitioners (GPs) are considered “specialists,” as general practice/family medicine is considered a specialty like any other hospital specialty. This is also the case in many other European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) countries. If there’s a more satisfying moment than qualifying from medical school, it must be finishing specialist training. Becoming a “specialist” […]
Muir Gray: What is helping?
Raymond Tallis’ excellent Times article on Humanity on 17 February made me reflect on helping, a topic about which I had been forced to rethink by Edgar Schein’s new book on helping. Schein is one of my heroes. His work on organisational culture has been a major influence on me in the last decade and […]
Martin McShane: One organisation?
In a recent letter Sir David Nicholson began to make clearer how he sees the NHS commissioning board and GP commissioners working together. It is a very important letter and warrants reading very carefully. The appointment of Sir David as the Chief Executive designate of the NHS commissioning board, late last year, seemed to signal that […]
Richard Smith: How can we encourage innovation in the NHS?
How can we encourage innovation in the NHS? Niti Pall, a GP and entrepreneur from Birmingham, asked herself this question and hit upon the idea of asking all the people she knows who might have some thoughts on the question to a meeting, putting them in a room together, letting them generate their own agenda, […]
Sandra Lako: Operation oxygen was a success
Over the Christmas holiday $11,760 was raised for oxygen concentrators for the Children’s Hospital in Sierra Leone. This is enough for at least 8 new concentrators. Last year I was amazed to raise $5,000 for our water charity, this year I’m blown away. Friends, family, churches, and strangers have all given generously to this cause. Thank […]
David Kerr on Barack Obama’s visit to Silicon Valley
Here on the edge of Silicon Valley we have just had a visit from Barack Obama. His schedule included closed door meetings with the tsars of technology; Jobs (Apple), Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Schmidt (Google). Although the meeting agenda is unknown there is a suspicion in the technosphere that the president is hoping for substantial help […]
Liz Wager: Mournful numbers
I love the fact that many words have multiple meanings. This multiplicity sometimes sets up strange resonances or odd mental images, especially if you pick the wrong meaning initially. The other day I was running a publication workshop and talking about tables and figures, when I got horribly tangled up by the fact that figures […]
Richard Smith: Competition versus integration
“Competition in health care should be tactical not ideological.” That was the main message from a recent debate on “Competition versus integration in the NHS” organised by the Cambridge Health Network and the King’s Fund. In case you haven’t heard of the Cambridge Health Network, it might crudely and unkindly be described as the opposition […]