Synchronicity. The meaningful coincidence of causally unrelated events. It was the Swiss psychologist and all round weaver of the wind Carl Jung who coined the word. […]
Julian Sheather: Medicine and nature
Category: Columnists
Tracey Koehlmoos: Good Health at Low Cost: the importance of political commitment
Almost any student of global public health will be familiar with the seminal work Good Health at Low Cost. In honor of the 25th anniversary of the release of the original book, the Rockefeller Foundation has commissioned an updated version of the book that includes five new countries or states: Ethiopia, Tamil Nadu, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand […]
Siddhartha Yadav: I am an international medical graduate (IMG)
The term international medical graduate or IMG, here in the United States (US), applies to those who are applying for a higher medical training in the US but did not graduate from a US medical school. I am an IMG. After completing my medical school from Nepal, I am now in the US with the […]
Richard Smith: A flare up of burnout
The German speaking world is having a flare up of burnout. The media are full of stories on burnout, and 150 000 school pupils in Austria are said to be burnt out together with “every second doctor.” The annual cost to Austria is supposedly 2.7 billion Euros, and, said Anita Rieder, professor of social medicine […]
Richard Smith: contemplating my deathbed
Through Twitter from my friend Martin I have received a list of the five things that people most commonly regret when dying. This is enormously useful information, much more so than a delicious recipe, a good joke or a great quote—my usual favourites. I could be on my deathbed in the next five minutes, but […]
Sandra Lako on the nurses’ workshop in Freetown.
Recently the Welbodi Partnership was privileged to have a paediatric nurse from the United Kingdom volunteering at the children’s hospital for two months. The volunteer nurse spent the first month assessing the nurses on the wards and working alongside them in a mentorship capacity. This provided an opportunity to work with the Sierra Leonean nurses […]
Douglas Noble on healthcare public health
The recent move to transfer the balance of commissioning power within the NHS to GPs, although laudable, raises a number of serious questions. Perhaps they are best summed up by a comment made to me recently by a GP colleague. In exasperation he declared: “I only get seven minutes to see a patient, so where […]
Martin McShane: Is there such a thing as evidence based management?
I grew up as a clinician during an era when evidence-based medicine, as a concept, penetrated the consciousness of the professions. Nowadays, one of my favourite meetings, which I chair, is PACEF (a pan health community Prescribing and Clinical Effectiveness Forum). It is regularly attended by clinicians, including GPs and consultants, to dissect, debate and […]
Richard Smith: Intercepted correspondence
I must start this blog with a competing interest. I’m the chair of Patients Know Best, a start up that aims to use information technology to enhance the relationship between patients and clinicians. In the long run we want to promote personal health records, where patients own all their records and can share them with […]
Liz Wager on falling in love with email again
There are days when I curse the existence of email. I curse it when I have been training all day yet feel obliged to sit up half the night to plough through the 50 messages that have popped uninvited into my in-box. I grind my teeth when people in meetings check their Blackberries every 5 […]