This is blog is not a rant—well not too much of a rant. It is an expression of serious frustration about the way the NHS is run and about the willingness of some senior NHS managers to become complicit in something near to dishonesty. Everyone at the frontline knows the NHS is running on empty. […]
Category: Columnists
Nick Hopkinson: NHS humanitarian crisis denial
When I qualified as a doctor in 1993, trolley medicine was completely routine. Post take ward rounds would typically visit people who had been waiting patiently in corridors overnight or longer. I’m ashamed to say it never occurred to me to think of this as a “crisis”—it was just the way things were. The cause […]
Richard Smith: The brutality of demography
Many of us elite liberals like to think of ourselves as rational creatures trying to get by in a crazy world, but we know that we are prey to all sorts of cognitive and emotional malfunctions. What we don’t perhaps recognise so well is the power that demography exerts on us, just as it does […]
David Oliver: Closing more hospital beds—the policy zombie they couldn’t kill
During the silly season over Christmas and New Year, NHS England Chief Nursing Officer Jane Cummings gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph. She advocated better investment in community and primary care services to allow more people to stay well, remain in their own homes, and return home sooner after acute illness or injury. Amen […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Medical anniversaries in 2017
Here are the topics covered by my selection of this year’s anniversaries, illustrated below: • chemistry (discovery of cadmium, lithium, and selenium; the Law of Mass Action); • infectious diseases (antisepsis; smallpox; measles); • molecular biology (structure of ribonuclease); • neurology (An Essay on The Shaking Palsy); • politics (Action on Smoking and Health); • […]
Richard Smith: Tales of sustainability I—transforming mental health services in Lambeth
In 2010 adult mental health services in Lambeth in South London were at breaking point, with most acute wards running at over 100% capacity (possible because of overspill into the expensive private sector). There was a collective view amongst partners that resources were not being spent effectively, going on small numbers of people, often with […]
Desmond O’Neill: Singing in the New Year
Little in human nature escapes the scrutiny of scholarship, and New Year resolutions are no exception. We tap into a tradition that dates back to Babylonian times. Their new year began in March with the sowing of the crops: in ancient Roman times this shifted to January, associated with Janus, the two faced god who […]
Mary E Black: New Year’s resolution—a smoke-free NHS
My doctor father used to regularly set his trousers on fire. Born in 1924, he started smoking cigarettes as a teenager. He died of a smoking related cancer in 2003. My doctor grandfather served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the first world war and died, when my father was 14, of smoking related […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Powers of ten
It’s appropriate that this blog, my hundredth under the “When I Use a Word” heading, a hundred being ten times ten, should appear in December, which, until the addition of January and February, was counted as the tenth month in the solar calendar. From the IndoEuropean root DEKM, ten, came the Greek word δέκᾰ, the […]
Daniel Sokol: The ethics of the on-call rota
A colleague is sick. Someone is needed to cover him tomorrow. There are no locums and no volunteers. Who should be selected? Few issues generate more passion and cause more heartache to doctors than filling a gap in the rota. Over the Christmas period, it is likely that tears have been shed and friendships lost […]