A few days ago I was reading an account by a journalist of a visit he had made to the refugee camps on the Nord pas de Calais coast just days before they were destroyed by the French police. Known collectively as “the jungle”, these camps are – or were – home to a floating […]
The NHS has so far accumulated almost 3 million incident reports, well on the way to being as tall as the British Telecom Tower if they were all piled up one on top of the other. Many significant research studies have identified the main barrier to incident reporting as lack of feedback to the reporter. Sound […]
Wednesday was an unusual day for the prime minister of Nepal. Right when he was about to leave for the capital from Nepalgunj in his helicopter, he received a call from one his acquaintances pleading to air-rescue a pregnant woman with placental haemorrhage from Rukum, a remote hilly district of Nepal. And so a rescue […]
The most interesting, and certainly the most chilling, experience I had in four days in Buenos Aires was to visit the memorial to “the disappeared.” […]
In the August 17th issue of Time magazine, there was an article that discussed the introduction of zinc as a treatment for childhood diarrhoea in Mali. The article has raised international awareness on the lifesaving use of zinc to prevent an estimated 400,000 child lives per year globally. However, two important points were not addressed […]
I’ve reached an age where various bits of my body don’t seeem to work as well as they used to (you’ll be able to find out which ones if you read on). I am also an avid believer that prevention is better than cure, and I actually believe some of the health advice I receive […]
Firsthand personal experience of a great crime can make it real in a way that full intellectual understanding will not. Spend two hours in close contact with an African AIDS orphan, and you’ll know what I mean. […]
Imagine being at the 60th anniversary of an organization and hearing from the first head of the organisation. It seems impossible, but I’ve just had that experience – listening to Nevin Scrimshaw, aged 91, describe the challenge and the excitement of the early days of the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP). […]
Today I feel deeply the shame of a monoglot. I’m at a meeting in Guatemala, and the organisers of a meeting of perhaps 200 people have had to hire two translators—for the benefit of me and one American. And tomorrow he departs, meaning that the two translators will be working just for me. How pathetic. […]
I’m worried that in the highly charged atmosphere created by the extraordinary US debate on health care my published anxieties about the NHS might brand me as unpatriotic. Perhaps Fox News or some equally evil, right wing American media outlet will track down my words in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and broadcast […]