One of the questions that occurred to many after the public inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust was “How could nurses and doctors behave like that and not do anything?” Similar thoughts arise after multiple examples of patients in care homes being abused and hover in the recurring questions of “Whatever happened to old fashioned […]
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” goes the aphorism—and so would say any who trust complacently in the exponential growth of “evidence based” this or that in medicine. Des Spence, for one, disagrees. In a recent BMJ editorial he argues evidence based medicine (EBM) is broken, it is “now the problem, fuelling overdiagnosis and […]
There are times when, as a lawyer advising NHS bodies, I get close to advising that the law is unworkable. An example emerged the day when I had to deal with the fact that clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have legal duties to “promote the involvement of patients and their carers in decisions made about healthcare […]
Health, says the WHO, is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. But could it be that some sort of infirmity is essential for being healthy? […]
Lots of my friends have recently retired or are retiring. None of them, as far as I know, have been on preretirement courses. They launch into retirement, which may be very long, ill prepared, perhaps reflecting on stories of people quickly fading and dying after retirement. I have a proposal for them. I’ve not been […]
The problem of how to tackle poor performing NHS trusts has dogged the NHS for many years. Companies that fail can be put into liquidation, factories close down, and people lose their jobs. However, a failing hospital is not a factory. An overspending hospital cannot “fail” and be closed because that would leave local people […]
The European Court of Justice has struck down and ordered a rehearing of the cases for an interim injunction to stop the European Medicines Agency’s new transparency policy on clinical trial results. The two companies, AbbVie and Intermune, will have to give more specific arguments as to why the relevant data should not be disclosed, […]
I was once in a restaurant in London when Nicole Kidman brushed past my table. Six feet of silver glamour. The effect was very much more intense than shaking hands with Prince Charles, meeting Tom Jones in a Paris hotel, or even watching Princess Diana at a garden party. Oddly I was reminded of Nicole […]
It’s taken me a while to write about my first residential for the NHS Leadership Academy Bevan Programme. So much went on there, I’ve needed a bit of time to come down from the whole thing. It was a dark day in November that found me racing through the English countryside to get to Leeds, […]
Greater transparency on clinical trial results would help reduce off-label promotion—the promotion of medicines for uses for which they have not been approved. Looking at the US since 2004, I compiled a table of cases taken by the Department of Justice involving off-label promotion where the fines, penalties, and/or settlements came to more than $300 […]