If a patient rings a drug company asking for information about one of the company’s drugs that he or she is taking, the company cannot answer. Companies are forbidden to “come between” patients and their doctors. Is that right? This question was discussed last week at a conference in Monte Carlo of some 3000 regulators, […]
I know not whether to laugh or cry. Into my inbox has just popped an index prohibitorum, a list of words drawn up by the Local Government Association that must not be used when providing information to the public. As a word-haunted liberal I am immediately – and quite properly for a liberal – in […]
Have some fun with Google. Type in “British Medical Association says yes.” It will give you about 650,000 results. Typing in “British Medical Association says no” gives you nearly 12 million! Of course this is entirely specious, irrelevant nonsense. Or is it? Having crossed the floor from front line clinical practice to full time management, […]
WHO recently released a medical school curriculum in patient safety. To date the number of downloads is in the 1000s. The curriculum includes teaching resources on systems thinking in healthcare, medical errors and other key areas of patient safety. […]
When governments spend money on “health” they get lots of sickness but very little health. Increasing expenditure on healthcare—now 17% of GDP in the United States and 9% of GDP here—leads to more and more people clinging onto life in a seriously impaired state. Better, I believe, to recognise that death is a friend and […]
The buzz word of late has been “pathways.” I guess that has been brought about by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg’s article in the Harvard Business Review and their book Redefining Health Care. The problem with commissioning along pathways, as one of my General Practice colleagues put it so succinctly, is that they don’t fit. […]
I remember as a medical student when the Rockall score for GI bleeding came into common practice. As with all checklists and tick box style scoring systems, well thumbed photocopies of ever decreasing quality slowly surfaced in emergency departments and acute medical units. The first time I ‘scored’ a patient I was surprised that their […]
What should you say to a major food company if asked to speak to its senior managers? A friend of mine, a cardiovascular epidemiologist, received such an invitation and emailed friends asking for advice on what to say. The context is that some people consider food companies to be like tobacco companies. They are making […]
Earlier this week, the fairly formidable Commons Science and Technology Committee published its report on homeopathy. For anyone who likes a bit of evidence with their medicine, the results were some distance from surprising. The NHS, it concluded, should stop funding homoeopathy. In addition the Medicines and Health Care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should not […]
The Oli family had already borrowed a hundred thousand Nepalese rupees (around 800 Pounds) for the treatment of their daughter with epilepsy. They needed more to continue the treatment. Unable to get this money, the parents and the epileptic daughter committed suicide. Health care has to be paid for by patients or their family in Nepal. Health […]