Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. The thing that currently pleases Angus Cameron, the medical director of the Dumfries and Galloway Health Board, is that the board […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. England has an urban health system with some rural areas, whereas Scotland has a rural system with some urban areas, observes […]
I squirm every time I hear that “increasing patient demand” is driving up costs in the NHS. I squirm because demand, although a standard technical word of economists, sounds so pejorative and blaming. “Those bloody patients. If they’d only stop demanding so much the NHS would be fine.” It’s crucial to understand (but is not […]
Many of us elite liberals like to think of ourselves as rational creatures trying to get by in a crazy world, but we know that we are prey to all sorts of cognitive and emotional malfunctions. What we don’t perhaps recognise so well is the power that demography exerts on us, just as it does […]
In 2010 adult mental health services in Lambeth in South London were at breaking point, with most acute wards running at over 100% capacity (possible because of overspill into the expensive private sector). There was a collective view amongst partners that resources were not being spent effectively, going on small numbers of people, often with […]
Richard Feynman, the great physicist, conducted a thought experiment in which he asked what one statement would he save if all of scientific knowledge was lost. His answer: “All things are made of atoms–little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being […]
The juxtaposition of an article by a dying (indeed, dead) journalist bemoaning the NHS denying him an expensive cancer drug and a spate of articles illustrating the “crisis in social care” shows well the conundrum facing the British people. I may be the only member of Britain’s “elite” who hadn’t heard of A A Gill, […]
A scandal in cardiothoracic research has led Martin Elliott, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Great Ormond Street, to conclude that current methods of publishing surgical innovations are not only inadequate but also shameful. In a Gresham lecture in London recently he presented proposals for improving the sharing of surgical innovations. The scandal The scandal, which is […]
Until last year the Cholera Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, could have a thousand admissions a day before and after the monsoon. On a calm day now it still has hundreds. Not all the patients, many of them children, have cholera but many do. Many of the children also have malnutrition, sometimes severe. In order to […]
When you enter the room in the Louvre that contains the Mona Lisa you find people crowded around the bullet-proof case that contains the Mona Lisa and largely ignoring the other paintings in the room, which include other masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci. Four-fifths of the people who visit the Louvre do so to visit […]