Akerman—a £12.3m community healthcare building designed by the architectual practice Henley Halebrown Rorrison—opened last year as part of the regeneration of Myatts Field North in the south London borough of Lambeth. Sandwiched between homes and a local park, the bold white building stretches for 80m and, according to its architects, was designed to mimic the flat […]
Category: Editors at large
Tessa Richards: Lifting the lid on information and learning from it
Progress. The march towards giving patients online access to their medical records is accelerating. The Society of Participatory Medicine has put out the bunting in welcome to the announcement by the OpenNotes initiative that 1.8 million more US patients can see and share full versions of their doctor’s notes; and that big US providers, including […]
Readers’ editor: Where has all the research news gone?
In March 2005 Ali Tonks wrote her first weekly Short Cuts column, a summary of nine papers published in the world’s other main general medical journals. The following year we published the first of Richard Lehman’s weekly journal review blogs. […]
Readers’ editor: Homophobia and the BMJ
In December 2012 Doug Kamerow asked in his regular BMJ column if gay marriage improves health. Eight months later the article attracted its first response. Gregory Gardner, a GP in the West Midlands, wanted to know why Kamerow had not mentioned the impact of same sex marriage on the health and wellbeing of children. Dr Gardner’s […]
Anita Jain on the Tokyo declaration on research integrity
“Raise your hand if:” —“You are an editor of a medical journal?” A sea of hands shot up in the air. —“The ‘Instructions to Authors’ of your journal indicates the reporting guidelines/ checklists to be complied with?” Less than half stay put. — “You do not accept a paper unless the checklist appropriate to the study […]
Tessa Richards: How can we get better at listening?
Reports urging health professionals to listen to patients and use their experience to improve the quality, value, and safety of healthcare have been flowing thick and fast. Last week another swelled their ranks. In his report on how the NHS might achieve the Shangri La of causing “zero harm,” US health guru Don Berwick headlined […]
Readers’ editor: The Liverpool Care Pathway—anyone care outside the UK?
Columnist Charles Moore asked in The Spectator magazine last week if the Liverpool Care Pathway might have inspired more confidence if it had been called, say, the Oxford Care Pathway. Was Moore referring to Oxford as an ancient seat of learning and innovation, or lazily perpetuating the myth that Liverpool is synonomous with riots, poverty, […]
Readers’ editor: Authors “ignoring” readers
Joginder Anand, a longstanding reader of the BMJ, wants to know how we can encourage authors to respond. In a recent email he asks: “Should the BMJ not make it mandatory for the leading authors of all articles to respond to criticisms or requests for clarifications? My question back to him is how? What would […]
Domhnall MacAuley: On being an editor
Why be a medical editor? Pippa Smart, with whom I run a course for medical editors, asked me recently if she could reproduce something I had written. As a strong advocate of open access—free access and unrestricted reuse—I had no hesitation in saying yes. I wrote this paragraph in 2010 to be included in “Why […]
Krishna Chinthapalli: The birth and death of the Liverpool Care Pathway
Birth of the pathway A few miles west of Mont Blanc, eighty years ago, Marie Curie arrived at a sanatorium in the foothills of the Alps to spend her final days. But they were not pleasant: “At times [her daughter] had to leave the room, because she could not bear to see her mother in […]