I recently attended a seminar concerned with human rights violations of women forced or coerced into sterilisation, a joint undertaking by the Open Society Institute and the International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organisations. For a week I was a guest in a handsome villa in snow-softened Salzburg with health professionals and human rights […]
I have a weekly teleconference with GPs from our emergent consortia. We set this up a while back to try and keep up with events, nix rumours and misconceptions and, collectively, try and make sense of what is going on. Over the last few weeks a lot of work has gone into developing a draft […]
When the largest teaching hospital in Dublin removed the Christmas crib from its atrium a few years ago, the response to the resulting public outcry suggested a timorous confusion about the difference between pluralism and secularism that is not uncommon in medicine. As artists are ever to the fore in illuminating societal dilemmas, South Park […]
Two weeks ago, while travelling outside of Dhaka, I passed the remnants of an accident that had left a man dead on the road. It was a jarring sight and like most events in Bangladesh, there was an enormous crowd. However, this was not the first such accident that I have seen. […]
Today was the launch of the journal club at the Ola During Children’s Hospital. Two professors, seven national doctors and three expatriate doctors sat together in an office for the first meeting of its kind. […]
Last week I had the privilege of speaking to a learning set of six former NHS managers who have kept up their learning for over 20 years. They have done well. One is in the House of Lords, two are regulators, and one has got rich. What could I say to them, I wondered? I […]
How would you like to be part of a television programme provisionally entitled “The town that gave up medicine”? The programme will be made by a company called Films of Record , which has an impressive pedigree, and shown on Channel 4. In some ways this is a programme about medicalisation, but you can imagine […]
Will the Big Society, GP commissioning, and a major reorganisation help or hinder the NHS in making 4% efficiency savings compound over four years? This was the question that kept running through my mind as I listened to a discussion at the King’s Fund on whether the current health reforms amount to “patient power or […]
An occupational hazard of being a geriatrician is that not infrequently I am asked at social occasions: “So, Des, when do you become ‘old’?” The questioner is usually a fit middle-class older person, often still working in one of the liberal professions. Inherent in the question is the sense of an impending instant rebuttal should […]
This is one of the busiest times of the year for the PCT. We have a tight timetable to assemble a plan and start contract negotiations. Soon we will be given an operating framework. We are given a lot of central direction and this year part of that is called QIPP; we have to have […]