Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
A woman I hardly know and I are sat in a café in a country far from Britain, and the conversation turns to death. She tells me of two deaths in her family in the NHS. The first is remarkable. An elderly woman, my companion’s mother, is waiting in a hospital for news of her […]
My early years at the BMJ were very bound up with Margaret Thatcher. I started as an assistant editor a month before she became prime minister in 1979 and was appointed editor just before she was dethroned as prime minister in 1990. Whatever I write about her will evoke fury in some quarter, and despite […]
“Email is not work. It’s a distraction.” So said a fierce, bearded lecturer at a talk I attended recently. Is he right? I have every reason to think him wrong because I tend to start every day by answering my emails—after looking at the BBC News website, Twitter, and Facebook, always in that order. I […]
Good Friday is an excellent day for thinking about death, but I think about death every day. I find it energising. As I write this blog on Easter Sunday, I read that Bruce Keogh, the medical director of NHS England, thinks that the first priority if the NHS is to stop us dying. Minutes after reading […]
I give a lot of talks, probably far too many. Sometimes they go well. Sometimes they are awful. A recent talk I gave was a flop. I failed to deliver what the audience wanted, and I was exposed as a fake. The event was at Madingley Hall, Cambridge University’s sub-Downton Abbey conference centre. I was […]
I’ve just been listening to a report on the radio about people with learning disorders dying 20 years prematurely because the NHS doesn’t treat them adequately. The Care Quality Commission says that a fifth of hospitals don’t provide dignified care for elderly people. A London professor said at the weekend that 20 000 people may […]
“You’ll do, but you’re not my first choice,” said Frank Dobson then Secretary of State for Health when he appointed Mike Rawlins as the first chairman of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 1999. Later the blunt speaking Dobson was asked whether NICE would work: “Probably not—but it’s worth a bloody good try.” […]
Nestlé, one of the world’s largest food companies, sells 1.2 billion products a day. This gives it huge potential for good or ill in a world where a billion people are undernourished, more than 2 billion are deficient in micronutrients (iron, iodine, zinc, and vitamin A), and 1.6 billion are overweight. So which is it, […]
We’ve been having this conversation since at least 1945, said a member of the audience at this week’s Cambridge Health Network meeting on partnerships between the NHS and the private sector. The dominant rhetoric now is that partnership between the NHS and the private sector will be essential for improving health and generating wealth for […]
The Arab world, despite its proud intellectual history and some of its countries being among the richest in the world, produces little research. Now the Arab Spring has shaken the whole region, and researchers in the Arab world think that the time has come to relate to the social earthquake and to promote research for […]