Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
I always rather enjoy being processed by the NHS. Instead of my usual panoramic (and perhaps highly misleading) view I’m down in the scrub. What struck me in my latest encounter was the extreme primitiveness of the records. The medical part of the encounter was well managed. I woke with a prominent floater in my […]
< Is it better to write blogs or a book? I wondered this the other night as I attended the party to celebrate the launch of a friend's book. […]
What follows is an email debate between Melanie Lovell, a palliative care physician in Sydney, and Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and chair of Patients Know Best. The debate began when Richard asked if Melanie had seen the editorial that he had written with two colleagues arguing that we need to take a […]
Tomorrow I’m running a workshop for medical students at Imperial College London on medical journalism, and I thought it essential to include something on using and enjoying social media. I imagined that I would find dozens of guides on the web, but to my surprise I couldn’t find anything satisfactory. And much of what I […]
Recently I had the privilege of talking with the members of an emerging clinical commissioning group (CCG). (For those who don’t know, CCGs are groups of GPs who will have responsibility for commissioning care for a whole population.) It was my job to try and lift the conversation above governance, finance, and the future of […]
Have you made a complaint recently? I don’t mean moaning to your partner about the weather or your neighbour’s barking dog but a written, formal complaint. If you haven’t you should—because we are relying on sharp elbowed, middle class people like you to keep up and even improve the performance of everything—the NHS, the BMA, […]
I’ve had a brainwave. It’s a proposal that could be implemented today and save the UK 5000 lives a year (at a rough guess.) The proposal is to stop all escalators immediately. I must confess that my brainwave, brilliant and simple as it is, has ignoble origins. Living in London and travelling regularly on the […]
Dear creative friends, Might you be interested to try and depict in some way—in a novel, play, series of poems, popular book, or whatever—a sustainable and believable world and how we might get there? I ask because us scientists (I hesitate to call myself a scientist but will for now) are extremely worried about the […]
I’m up early and off to the death festival for the third day with a very light heart, and we are straight into practicalities. […]
The second day of the festival began with Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, explaining that the festival is about “reshaping our ability to look death in the eye, and to have a relaxed way of talking about death.” In a secular age, she says, we don’t have ways of congregating to […]