One word that keeps being used in response to the Francis report into failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust is “shame.” Interestingly, it seems to be used more than “guilt” and most certainly more than “remorse.” This is worrying because shame is particularly hard to process, an emotion that typically lurks around in individuals and organisations, […]
Category: Columnists
Julian Sheather: Should I sign him off sick?
Thou shalt not judge. A GP asked me recently whether he should sign patients off sick when he thought they were swinging the lead. I talk to a lot of GPs and I get asked a lot of difficult questions – it goes with the ethics territory – but this one looked like a no-brainer: […]
James Raftery: Value based pricing—equality effects and ways forward
This blog reports on the third workshop held by the Department of Health on the methods being planned for value based pricing, due to start in January 2014. Previous workshops on wider social benefits (WSBs) and quality adjusted life year (QALY) weights were reported in previous blogs. This workshop extended the work reported previously, with […]
David Kerr: Driving in the (near) future
The Department of Health has just written to GP’s to encourage them to stop being so mean when it comes to providing blood glucose testing strips to people living with type 1 diabetes. Part of the reasoning for sending the letter relates to guidance from the UK Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency for patients which […]
Richard Smith: Non communicable disease and sustainable development
There is a sense that if you are not working at something that helps counter climate change (or climate disruption, as it should be called) then you are wasting your time. You are Nero, and Rome is burning. Those of us who work on non communicable disease (NCD) are “lucky” in that most of what […]
Richard Smith: Should hubris be a disease?
Should hubris be a disease, asks my friend Faith. After a second I conclude, “Of course. It’s perhaps the most dangerous disease of all in that it destroys not just individuals, but potentially our whole species.” I think of hubris simply as men acting as gods (even though I don’t believe in gods). But Wikipedia […]
Penny Campling: What does apologising for a dysfunctional culture really mean?
The Francis Inquiry report rightly focuses on the need to transform the healthcare culture. It has made it clear that fault lines run throughout the NHS, from top to bottom, and that the inhumanity exposed at Mid Staffordshire is not restricted to that locality. The huge number of recommendations in the report (290) is presumably […]
Tiago Villanueva: Poverty and hunger in Portugal
Some time ago a patient told me that he needed to borrow money from a neighbour to buy a train ticket to come to his appointment at the practice. At the same time, this patient told me about the scarcity of food at home, and how it was a constant struggle to feed his daughter. […]
Julian Sheather: Should doctors make moral judgments about their patients?
Thou shalt not judge. There are times when it feels like our eleventh commandment. In our liberal, offence-free world there are supposed to be no good and bad choices, no good or bad lives, only a plurality of equal lifestyles equally deserving of respect. Arguably, the charge of moralism is now more widely feared than […]
Richard Smith: Syria, now’s top sorrow
Climate change will soon destroy us. Global poverty is increasing. Non-communicable disease is sweeping the planet. Communicable disease is far from defeated and may re-emerge in new and terrible forms at any moment. Mothers are continuing to die in childbirth. War is now endemic, and nowhere, literally nowhere is safe. The tentacles of the pharmaceutical […]