I am growing a moustache. This is not the kind of thing you usually need to broadcast, but I am growing it as part of Movember because I believe these kinds of mission specific campaigns are crucial to finding new ways to fund health related services. […]
Category: Columnists
Billy Boland: Final thoughts on the NHS Leadership Academy
Having made my final submission for the NHS Leadership Academy, and after being told I’ve passed the course by my learning set, the programme should be in the bag. That is unless there are any last minute surprises from the validating board coming up. I’ve always enjoyed the space between handing in coursework and getting […]
Desmond O’Neill: A gerontological fear of missing out
Faced with a gerontology conference with 30 parallel sessions over five days, the texting argot of teenagers comes in handy. To LOL and YOLO has been added FOMO: Fear of Missing Out! Effective FOMO management strategies involve several ingredients. The first is not change between sessions as invariably the timetable has changed in the other […]
Neal Maskrey: Treating the patient and not the disease
It was the biggest turnout for many a year. In our small coastal town in the north west of England, 5000 of us stood together bare headed for an hour on a magnificently clear but cold November morning. The Salvation Army brass band was muted but played beautifully, and there was pomp and circumstance aplenty. But […]
The BMJ Today: How can doctors learn about research?
In my previous role at The BMJ, I had the chance to work on Endgames, whose educational content is aimed at helping junior doctors in the UK and around the world prepare for their postgraduate examinations. Apart from case reports and picture quizzes, Endgames also include a series of weekly quizzes called “Statistical question,” which […]
David Oliver: The media narrative on quality in healthcare—helpful or harmful?
On 28 October, I was part of a Health Foundation and Nuffield Trust “Quality Watch” panel, speaking on the media representation of quality in healthcare. Truth be told, I had been on call for four straight days, then that morning my ward doctor had gone off sick, and it had been touch and go as […]
Richard Smith: No case for retracting Lancet’s Gaza letter
In 1973 about 280 000 scientific articles were published, but there were no retractions. When I became an editor in 1979, retractions were rare and of little interest to anybody. Now we have moved to a point when somebody passionately objects to an article in a scientific journal they call for it to be retracted. […]
William Cayley: Social history on the back roads
Social context and relationships may shape what drives our patients, but sometimes the best way to ponder these is on a drive! En route to a home visit today, I was met at the edge of town by a road crew doing last-minute sealing work before the onset of winter (despite what you may have […]
William Cayley: Overdiagnosis, uncertainty, and epistemology
Many thanks to Anita Jain for reporting on the “Overdiagnosis” session at the Cochrane Colloquium—I wish I could have been there. The suspicion that overdiagnosis (or at least over testing) is driven in part by the quest for certainty, is corroborated by an implementation study of the Vancouver chest pain rule. When the Vancouver chest […]
Richard Smith: Leapfrogging to universal health coverage
Low and middle income countries have the chance to create health systems that will perform much better than those in high income countries. Copying health systems that look increasingly unsustainable would not be wise. Instead, low and middle income countries can “leapfrog” to something better, and the World Economic Forum has a project to make […]