To many people in the US, flu season is rather like world cup football is to the rest of us. Flu has been on the front page of many newspapers and has been covered in the television news. It may have been a slow news week after the Christmas and New Year holidays, but everyone […]
Category: Columnists
Pritpal S Tamber: Why “paperless” is meaningless
The National Health Service (NHS) of England is enduring the enthusiasm of a new health secretary. As he gets to grips with his £110bn toy he is, as you’d expect, eager to make the right noises about the future of healthcare. One of his promises, though, is to make the service “paperless.” This only illustrates […]
Tiago Villanueva: Is there an end in sight for austerity?
I’ve blogged before about the impact of austerity on healthcare, mainly on the hard hit Portuguese healthcare system. And just when I thought things have already gone too far, new developments over the last few days have cast even more dark clouds over the healthcare system, and have spread additional apprehension and outrage in the […]
David Kerr: Crowd sourcing clinical research
Taxpayers in the UK fund the NHS but are rarely asked directly about how the money should be spent. A few years ago local patients with diabetes were asked what our diabetes centre should do if for some reason they were bequeathed a pot of money. Options included screening for diabetes, treating obesity, early detection […]
Desmond O’Neill: Think global, act local
Visiting Kennebunkport, Maine, in winter is a surreal experience, almost akin to playing an extra in the Truman Show. Neat clapper board houses and snow encrusted churches cluster around a serpiginous and sylvan sea inlet. In the grocery cum café store locals cluster over coffee and cinnamon buns amid the general supplies in an ambience […]
Muir Gray: Developing a system budget
Read the rest of this series of blogs about designing and planning population based systems of care here. Step 8: Developing a system budget One of the aims of developing systems is for clinicians and patient representatives to be involved in the stewardship of resources. They can fight for more resources, but they also need […]
Liz Wager: Follow the rules—as soon as we’ve written them
One of my most vivid schoolday memories is of being told off for doing something I didn’t know was forbidden. My crime was “running in the school corridors” which seemed perfectly reasonable behaviour to me (as I was late for a lesson), but which apparently was against the school rules. I can still remember my […]
Paul Glasziou: Most innovations are not advances: innovation + evaluation = progress
Innovation is currently fashionable. But new is not necessarily better [1]. Progress rests in sifting out the effective innovations. Edison clearly understood this process: when he developed the light bulb, he tried and discarded thousands of possible filaments. Without testing and recording each option, he may have gone on a random walk and left us […]
Desmond O’Neill: Turner, medical history, and ageing
Limiting access adds savour to most sensory experiences, a sentiment captured by Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Advent: “through a chink too wide comes in no wonder.” A narrow aperture to one such wonder is provided every January by the National Galleries of Ireland and Scotland, one that also has interesting linkages to both medicine […]
Kieran Walsh: Should we be more short term in our thinking about medical education?
Putting the horse before the cart always seems like a sensible idea. And so it is with funding initiatives—it seems sensible to invest in starting up sustainable projects that will have long term positive outcomes. This is largely the received wisdom in investing in healthcare professionals’ education—invest in the undergraduate education of healthcare professionals in […]