It’s ironic, isn’t it? Even as last ditch truce talks to settle the junior doctors’ dispute got underway this week, UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt has come under fire yet again for going to war with doctors on the flimsiest of pretexts. Yesterday, a stroke physician from Oxford University, Professor Peter Rothwell, talked about research that […]
Category: Columnists
David Oliver: A dispute played out via soundbites and spin cannot end well for services
I write this a few hours after the BMA agreed that it would take up the offer of renewed contract talks with the government, brokered by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. The government have in turn agreed a temporary suspension of imposition. PR has coloured the whole saga of the contract stand-off. What had […]
William Cayley: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” One commonly hears the mournful refrain that American healthcare is “broken”—whether demonstrated by reports “hospitals have been gaming the system to make their re-admission numbers look good,” the paradox that our escalating healthcare expenditures produce only average life expectancy outcomes, or (what may seem more mundane to policy […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Recognising weasel words
To recap. A weasel word is defined in the OED as “an equivocating or ambiguous word, which takes away the force or meaning of the concept being expressed”. “I can suck melancholy out of a song,” says Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It (picture), “as a weasel sucks eggs.” The phrase “weasel words” was […]
Desmond O’Neill: Peak medical students
Asked to do a column on medical education for an Irish newspaper, I was struck by how little professional debate we have had on the extraordinary increase in student intakes in these islands. Traditionally Ireland has had a large number of medical schools proportionate to its population: recent presentations in the Royal Colleges of Physicians […]
Richard Smith: Ugandan health—what should be the priorities?
Uganda, like all low income countries, has formidable health problems and limited resources. If you were the health minister in Uganda what would be your priorities? This question was in the back of my mind as I listened to the presentations at the Uganda Health Summit held in BMA House and organised by the Uganda […]
Nick Hopkinson: Canvassing—should medical students get out on the doorstep?
The price good people pay for not engaging in politics is bad government. I prefer this version of Plato’s aphorism to the more usual “rule by your inferiors” one. The guiding ethical principle should not be one’s position within a hierarchy, but rather that society should be fair and reasonable; organised in a way that […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Weasel words
It has been reported that Department of Health lawyers have said that the secretary of state for health, known to us as the SoSH or the Cunctator, never intended to “impose” a contract on the junior hospital doctors, only that the contract would be “introduced” from August (as quoted in the Independent on 18 April). […]
David Oliver: Are we recreating the conditions that led to the Mid Staffs scandal and Francis inquiries?
I am worried that we are heading right back to the very conditions that led to the Francis inquiries, losing any progress we have gained on the back of them. In health, as in many industries, it often takes a major incident or scandal to prevent more from occurring in the future. But let’s not […]
Richard Smith: The deeper causes of the doctors’ strike—a thought experiment
I’m on my way to walk among bluebells, but my mind is on junior doctors engaging in a total strike, not providing even emergency care, for the first time in the 68 year history of the NHS. How did it come to this? I feel that as “a sort of Doctor” for 40 years and […]