Writers of this daily update about new stuff published by The BMJ usually face an embarrassment of riches—more than 100 articles go online each week, along with dozens of rapid responses, video abstracts, and audio interviews. But yesterday hardly anything got published because we needed to clear the decks for a new website, which heralds […]
Category: Editors at large
The BMJ Today: Health challenges across the divide
Overdiagnosis and over-treatment of malaria is a major problem in South and central Asia, where malaria is a minority cause of febrile illness, and primary health centres often rely on clinical symptoms for a diagnosis. Researchers from London and Afghanistan conducted a patient randomised study in a primary care setting in two areas where malaria […]
Tessa Richards: Health 2.0—new technologies and e-patients
“All changed, changed utterly.” W B Yeats’s famous line was triggered by the Irish rebellion in 1916. Close to 100 years on, it could describe how digital technologies and social media are changing the world; not least the world of healthcare. At the Doctors 2.0 & You conference—launched and led by Denise Silber, a Paris […]
Tessa Richards: The right to be supported to self manage disease
On the eve of the EU elections, reports and manifestos aimed at attracting the attention of newly elected MEPs and commission officials have been flowing thick and fast. A new one shortly to be added to their list has the working title, “Empowered patients are a resource not a cost.” It will set out recommendations […]
The BMJ Today: Late nights with Iain Chalmers
“Tired” pupils aged over 16 at a private school in Surrey are to start lessons at 1.30pm. The school’s headteacher Guy Holloway says the move is based on research by neuroscientists which says that teenagers have a biological predisposition to go to bed later and get up later, and better sleep in teenage years is […]
The BMJ Today: Marking International Workers’ Day
Across the world, celebrations marking the International Workers’ Day herald the onset of May. Having its origins in the ‘eight hour day’ movement, which signifies “eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” this day recognises efforts to transform labour policies towards promoting the welfare of workers. Propitiously timed, we have a couple of blogs […]
Jane Smith: Robot journalism
Imagine a news story written and published within three minutes of the event happening. That’s a real scenario described by Emily Bell in her T P Stead Lecture at the British Library last week. I was intrigued by her title “Robot reporters” and went to hear more about “Journalism in the Age of Automation and […]
Richard Hurley: Why the food industry doesn’t find a sugar tax so sweet
A flurry of media attention followed England’s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies’s recent admission that a sugar tax may have to be considered to try to reverse the overweight and obesity that now afflicts a third of UK children. Such a tax might reduce consumption, the theory goes, by reducing demand for energy dense foods […]
Tessa Richards: “All I ask is that you listen”
If healthcare was a patient, the diagnosis would be multimorbidity. There is a near terminal mix of fragmentation of services, failure to listen and respond to patients concerns, lack of compassion, patchy performance on protecting and promoting health, and unsustainably high costs. Simplistic perhaps, but fighting talk galvanises. Maureen Bisognano, president of the Institute of […]
Birte Twisselmann: European Union—live
As a three-times member of the national judging panel for the UK winner, I was invited to attend the awards ceremony for the EU Health Prize for Journalists 2013, at the European Commission in Brussels on 7-8 April 2014. And in the same way as last year, this meant an intense couple of days with […]