Two of the major charges being thrown at this week’s health white paper have been that it is completely unexpected and brain-meltingly radical. On the first point I’ve already had dozens of conversations with people who just “didn’t see this coming.” David Aaronovitch wrote in yesterday’s Times that there was little point in manifestos if […]
Category: Editors at large
Domhnall MacAuley: Don’t mention climate change
Don’t talk about climate change. Don’t even use the words. It is liable to make people stick their heads in the sand. David Pencheon, Director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit (England), in his address at the Society for Academic Primary Care, thinks we should talk about sustainable living and emphasise the importance of sustainability, […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Society of academic primary care meeting July 7th-9th
When a surgeon praises the achievements of primary care, you sit up and listen. Admittedly, Professor Sam Leinster was welcoming delegates to the Society of Primary Care meeting at the University of East Anglia where he is Dean. And he did say he was fed the script by Amanda Howe, Professor of Primary Care. But, […]
Domhnall MacAuley on IVF
Death and the quest for new life seem unlikely companions. Last week’s headline read “Inquest told woman who died in car fire was ‘devastated’ over failed IVF.” The other side of the bonny baby glossy media success story is the suffering of fate. Infertility pushes couples to extremes. It can become an obsession, a single […]
Edward Davies: GP Commissioning. Again.
Here at Groundhog Day, I mean the NHS Confederation annual shindig, the talk of the conference floor is GP commissioning. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s speech last night was pretty low on laughs, but what he lacked in charisma he made up for in trumpeting this latest idea. And when I say latest idea, I of […]
Birte Twisselmann: Web publishing – less is more
Stanford University’s HighWire Press, webhosts to the BMJ and some 1400 other scholarly journals, convened its spring meeting in Palo Alto, California, on 7-8 June 2010 in warm, sunny weather on the stunning university campus. Some 200 US and UK publishing types attended, and the two days were filled with a real buzz from interesting […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Elite performance in endurance sports
To meet with the president of the American College of Sports Medicine…you arrange to go for a jog. A family doctor, team doctor, researcher, departmental chair and now a major leader in American health, Tom Best (Ohio State University), has achieved a lot but he took a difficult road and, he and his family, have […]
Helen Jaques: Reporting from the front line of research
Monday morning. Wake up, drag yourself into town . . . and spend 45 minutes or so in a magnetic resonance imaging machine. That’s how I spent my Monday morning at least. I was volunteering as a research subject at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, just round the corner from the BMJ offices in […]
Richard Hurley: Private financing of hospitals
Doctors should demand publication of the details of deals made between the UK government and private investors to build hospitals under private finance initiatives (PFIs), Professor Allyson Pollock told a meeting of the Medical Journalists’ Association at the Royal College of General Practitioners on 3 June. She showed new evidence that these schemes are more […]
Sally Carter on the Council of Science Editors conference
I went to the Council of Science Editors conference in Atlanta, which was snazzily entitled “The Changing Climate of Scientific Publishing: The Heat is On.” Atlanta was indeed hot. I had to get over the guilt of flying to a conference with climate change at its heart, then arriving at a completely air-conditioned hotel, wasting […]