I spent last Wednesday afternoon with seven 3-4 year olds from Levenhall nursery in Musselburgh, East Lothian, just outside Edinburgh. They were taking part in an immersive theatre production by the children’s theatre company Licketyspit. I have known the company’s director, Virginia Radcliffe, for 18 years, since we met at a post natal group soon […]
Category: Editors at large
Kirsten Patrick: COHRED Forum 2012
This week I attended and participated in a panel discussion at the Council for Health Research and Development (COHRED)’s 14th Global Forum for Health Research in Cape Town, South Africa. Last year the Global Forum merged with COHRED, and this year’s forum has had a distinctly different focus from the thirteen previous meetings. Whereas in […]
Rebecca Coombes: Soaring rents but Ghana gets it right on vaccinations
It’s boom time in Ghana right now. The country’s economy soared by 14% in 2011 thanks to new oil receipts—earning it a listing as the world’s fastest growing economy. This prosperity is a mixed blessing say the locals. Rents in the capital city Accra are approaching London levels—$2000 a month for an apartment in a […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Ernest Hart leaps out of the Raidió
Tootling along in the car on holiday. Brain idling, half listening to the radio when, out of the middle of an Irish language programme, jumped Ernest Hart. A former editor of the BMJ in whose eponymously named room we often have editorial meetings. But, on Raidió na Gaeltachta? A historian recalled the spinning and weaving […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Patient safety and sports performance
Eighty thousand spectators hold their breath as they watch the penalty. Hushed anticipation. Fearful will he hold his nerve, handle the pressure, cope with the stress. But, is it that important? Nobody dies. Not like the decisions you make every day. For a surgeon or anaesthetist, fatal outcomes can be immediate. For others their mistakes […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Docs in the box—at International Forum on Quality & Safety in Healthcare
We live in our own little boxes. Maureen Bisognano from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement , in her keynote address, told us we need to get out of our own little boxes if we are to improve healthcare. Quality improvement means breaking out of silos. She told us we needed to focus more on our […]
Deborah Cohen on the attempts to track down unpublished oseltamivir trial data
“The same standard of openness should apply to all (drug) trial data, whether sponsored by industry, investigator-initiated, or sponsored by public grant-giving bodies.” That’s the view of representatives from the European Medicines Agency and the regulatory bodies from France, the UK, and the Netherlands writing in PLoS Medicine. Their statement comes as accompaniment to an […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Cycling spo(o)ked
At the Commonwealth Games I met the cyclists. At the end of each day we grouped together in the television room to watch the edited highlights of the Tour de France. Towards the end of the Games, I went to watch the road race and was hooked. As the sun went down on my first […]
Tessa Richards: Who is defining patient-centred care?
If the reality of patient care matched the rhetoric of the average “patient-centred” NHS provider it wouldn’t have been necessary for NICE to produce formal guidance on how to improve the patient’s experience of care, a recent BMJ editorial suggests. Nor would an international literature review of the indicators used to measure patient-centred care have […]
David Payne: Changes to scholarly articles
Should the journal article change, and if so, how? In this multimedia age, the workforce is increasingly populated by people who grew up with the internet, scholarly publishers anticipate the demise of the traditional article and spend lots of time rethinking how best to present the information it contains. […]