“There’s a 50% chance that humans will be extinct by the end of the century because of climate change,” said Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health, at last week’s conference on environmental sustainability. I’d heard that before, but it made me think of my daughter, who can expect to live for […]
“The UK coalition government’s proposals for health reform have generated much heat without a great deal of light. One predictable response has been the “concern” that the private sector is about to take over the running of the health service. Worse still is the prospect of turning the NHS into a clone of the US […]
The world is on the cusp of a major epidemic of breast cancer, said Peter Boyle, head of the international prevention research institute in Lyon, France, at a conference on breast cancer in Oman last weekend. The incidence of breast cancer has tripled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again by […]
We are only two months away from it becoming real for GP consortia. I was looking through the information going to one of our pathfinder executive meetings in the next week. The GP consortium is looking good for this year and will deliver within budget unless something unexpected happens. Buried within the report was some worrying […]
“There are five things about the NHS that are not sustainable,” said Phil Morley, chief executive of Hull and East Yorkshire Trust, in the middle of a conference last week on sustainability and health. He spoke like Cicero, only with more humour and a strong Northern accent. The conference was about environmental sustainability, but Morley […]
While driving past an NGO hospital last week a friend read out a sign painted on the hospital wall stating that patients need to come with their own blood donors. He thought that was very odd but having been here for years it didn’t seem strange to me. I suppose in the developed world, one […]
Street dwellers, as homeless people are called locally, are ubiquitous in Dhaka. As a health systems researcher, much of my work is far removed from the people around me. Things like systematic reviews, knowledge translation platforms, and capacity building seem to have little immediate impact on the ultrapoor, but recently we completed a small project […]
As we wrestle with uncertain futures, financial stringencies, and retaining a focus on ensuring services continue to get delivered, there is a creeping realisation that something is missing. There is a bill before Parliament which details, in jargon that defeats me, the changes to the structures for commissioning. It lays out the way the system […]
“We live in a world of competing sorrows,” said Daniel Moynihan, the US senator. We also live in a world of competing agendas, and the NHS has to think about saving money, increasing productivity, improving quality and access, and many other issues as well as achieving environmental sustainability. And despite their fine words, the health […]
The current issue of the BMJ includes four letters venting an angry response to an opinion piece on euthanasia on 22nd December 2010. The rapid responses reveal even greater depth of feeling. At the heart of the issue is the view that there has not been even-handed coverage, and the pro-euthanasia lobby has been given unfairly […]