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 […]
Category: Tessa Richards
Tessa Richards: It’s time to turn healthcare upside down
March sees the picturesque town of Basel transformed as it celebrates Fastnacht. Masks are donned, people pour into the streets to the sound of piccolos and drums, and party. Transformation was very much on the minds of the 300 participants from 22 countries who walked over confetti strewn streets to the town’s spanking white congress […]
Tessa Richards: Access to health records—patients first
Criticism of the government’s plan to collect data from patients’ medical records to build a new NHS database—care.data—has been fast and furious. With data collection postponed amid public concern about its confidentiality the government is now fielding advice on how to get its “busted” scheme right next time round. While the research potential of analysing […]
Tessa Richards: The rise and reach of expert patients
In the Victorian era the patients who acquired public profiles tended to be doubly disadvantaged. Think Joseph Merrick. His fame as the “Elephant Man” stemmed from others exploiting his disfiguring disorder (Proteus syndrome?) for financial gain. Now patients are becoming well known less for shouldering disease burdens so much as using their experience to help […]
Tessa Richards: Leadership matters—lessons from Lithuania
At this year’s European Health Forum Gastein, the wannabe Davos for health, a call went out for “stronger leadership on health.” Europe needs health ministers who can advocate to protect the health of its citizens as effectively as their counterparts in finance and industry speak up for and guard it’s economic interests. Tweets from the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tessa Richards: Stop pushing propaganda to patients
There is something to be said for wearing your heart on your sleeve, and few do it to greater effect than Margaret McCartney, a GP in Glasgow. She exuded frustration as she galvanised a session on public and patient involvement at the Evidence Live conference, in which she explained why she had reached the point […]
Tessa Richards: Preventing disease with plastic water bottles and esprit de corps
A mosquito buzzed idly against the window inside the coach. Was it carrying the dengue virus we wondered? And if it was, what is the chance of dying from dengue haemorrhagic fever? Such questions run through your mind when you are in a country where the disease is endemic, and as the WHO has recently […]
Tessa Richards: Forget fashion—go for value
How much of the care patients receive is determined by their doctor’s decision to provide it as opposed to their need and preference for it? And how much money might be saved if investigations and treatments of limited or no value to patients were stopped? These questions were debated at two recent meetings on practice […]