In the 1980s there was an eight year waiting list in India for a landline telephone. Long distance “trunk calls” had to be booked with an operator and required you to stay in all day and wait to be connnected. Now the subcontinent is the world’s largest cellphone market, with 851.7m mobile phone subscribers. The […]
Category: David Payne
David Payne: Homoeopathy and the Royals
At a recent BMJ planning meeting we talked of commissioning an article about how the Murdoch family business had shaped public policy in countries where its newspapers and broadcast channels are major players. But after reading Edzard Ernst’s interview in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper, which recounts a well publicised disagreement with Prince Charles over homoeopathy, I wonder if we should turn […]
David Payne: Nostalgia for closed hospitals
We have too many metropolitan acute hospitals and failing ones should be closed, said UK nursing leader Peter Carter in a front page story in Friday’s Times newspaper. He is right, says the newspaper in a leader article, and should be joined by other powerful voices, perhaps to silence the nostalgia junkies who mount campaigns […]
David Payne: Competition and the NHS reforms
With the pause button still firmly pressed on the NHS reforms in England, one former Tory health secretary claims this week that the debate is losing touch with reality. Stephen Dorrell, who now chairs the Commons health select committee, says the row about competition is nonsensical and could harm patients because it’s already happening in […]
David Payne: Safe planes and the night handover
Patient safety conference organisers are fond of the analogy between aviation and medicine. Former F18 pilot Steve Kreister addressed delegates attending the paediatrics day of Risky Business 2010 in London yesterday afternoon. Airline pilot Martin Bromiley – founder of the Independent Clinical Human Factors Advisory Group (CHFG) – addressed BMJ Group’s Agents for Change conference […]
David Payne: Does London need the City?
A young woman started work in London this week and her starting salary is the same figure paid to her aunt when she first moved to the capital after college in 1985. A relative of mine was recently offered his first paid job in journalism in London. His salary – £16 000 – is around […]
David Payne on Florence Nightingale
Today, 100 years ago, Florence Nightingale died aged 90. Much has been written about the Lady with the Lamp, who left behind her aristocratic life to nurse wounded soldiers in the Crimea, returning to London to help found the modern nursing profession, campaign for sanitary reform and hospital design, and hone her skills as a […]
David Payne asks: Should forensic medicine be female-led?
Since 2000 the Havens centres in London have helped more than 11 000 people of both sexes who have been raped or sexually assaulted. Like many sexual assault referral centres (SARCs), the Havens doesn’t employ male doctors. All of its examiners are female, so if you want a male doctor at a follow up appoinment, […]
David Payne on Colin Blakemore’s childhood
The UK coalition government’s Academies Bill was rushed through Parliament this week, giving the green light to parents to set up their own schools. Critics argue that it’s a backward step, a return to the two-tierism that characterised the distinction between grammar and secondary moderns before they were replaced by comprehensive education in much of […]
David Payne on Raoul Moat and Desert Island Discs
The sorry saga of fugitive gunman Raoul Moat has no doubt triggered countless watercooler conversations about the extent to which he was “mad, bad, or just plain evil.” A colleague described him as less of a threat than the media painted him on the grounds that all of the people he killed or maimed were […]