Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
One of the pleasures of being a doctor, albeit one who doesn’t see patients, is that you get to chat to other doctors, real ones, about the tricky decisions they have to make. I’ve had two such sets of conversations in the past week that have stuck in my mind. […]
These days I spend lots of time in low and middle income countries, and as I think more about their health problems and less about the endless reorganisations of the NHS, I begin to see the world very differently. Recently I was asked to give the Redfern Oration to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, […]
Are you brave enough to feed back when you see poor behaviour? I wish I was—because feedback can lead to improvement, whereas silence allows the poor behaviour to continue. I’ve been thinking about feedback after talking to some medical students, but let me begin with my own failures. I go regularly with my mother on […]
Why has the NHS been so much slower to use information technology than other sectors and what might be done to encourage it to speed up? These were questions addressed yesterday at an NHS Confederation seminar, but we were urged to talk opportunity not barriers and to avoid answers like change the culture and the […]
One of the great pleasures of living in London is that a friend can email you (in this case from Salamanca) and say: “Hey, did you know Clay Shirky, a world famous internet guru, is speaking at LSE in 60 minutes?—and you can drop everything, go, and be thrilled. I knew about Shirky from having […]
Is US health reform a “monumental system transformation or a fatally flawed compromise?” This was the question addressed last night by Alan Gerber, doctor, economist, health policy expert, government adviser, and holder of five chairs at Stanford University (enough, pointed out by the chair of the meeting, for a one person dinner party) in the […]
The Royal College of Physicians and various other medical bodies want doctors to be serious about tackling the social determinants of health, and have held a conference on the topic. There were some brilliant speeches (plus some duds of course), but all day I found myself asking whether doctors were part of the solution or […]
The University of California has told the Nature Publishing Group that it will suspend its subscriptions to the group’s 67 journals if it does not relent over its decision to raise its charges to the university by 300%. The university will also urge its staff not to submit to and review for the journals and to […]
Baby boomers—those of us born between the end of the war and the early 60s—are a failed generation,” said Alex Jadad, chief innovator and founder, Centre for Global eHeath Innovation (and much else), at a conference on last week. I’m a baby boomer. Am I the member of a failed generation? Sadly I think that […]
Almost unnoticed by medical schools and health systems the nature of health care has changed radically. The traditional medical model is “patient admitted, diagnosed, treated, cured, sent home,” and the special role of doctors, said one chief medical officer recently, is “diagnosis, diagnosis, diagnosis.” In reality there is little diagnosis and even less curing. Most […]