We need to do everything we can to redress the imbalance between patients in hospital and healthcare professionals […]
Patricia Cantley: We must remember how scary hospitals can be for our patients
Category: Guest writers
Nazrul Islam: The international medical community must act to help Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh
The forced displacement of the Rohingya population has a historical root since the late 1970s. Approximately 200,000 Rohingya were displaced to neighbouring Bangladesh in 1978, and about 260,000 in 1991-92. [1] The recent displacement of 400,000-420,000 Rohingya, of which about 240,000 were children, made it by far the largest displacement of Rohingya population. [2] The […]
Diana Anderson: There remains a fundamental gap between the aims of hospital design and the final user experience
Matt Morgan wrote previously about the impact that poor hospital design has on staff, patients, and healthcare. It is a timely debate and hit home for me as I am both a physician and an architect. When I was a resident doctor, a large part of my hesitation in pursuing advanced training as a doctor […]
Katherine Sleeman: Assisted dying—how safe is safe enough?
We must separate the question of whether assisted dying is morally acceptable from the question of whether it should be legalised […]
Lieven Annemans: We need to reach a common understanding about real world data
Although real world data can complement data from trials, overly optimistic expectations about its use may lead to a situation of “surreal world data” […]
Samar Betmouni: Time for a new digital pathology strategy and re-imagined diagnostic service in the UK
An evaluation of the UK’s pathology capacity by Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has identified that over the next 5-10 years “there is likely to be a severe crisis.” The report highlights a 4.5% year-on-year increase in the number and complexity of histopathology requests since 2007/08; the majority of which are for the investigation of cancer. […]
Rediscovering humanitarianism in the wake of the aid agencies scandal
As the reverberations of the recent scandal regarding sexual exploitation in the aid sector continue to ricochet around the world, hogging headlines, and eliciting the inevitable (belated) response of “never again,” millions of desperately in need people in unimaginably appalling situations continue to suffer—unheard, unseen, and largely forgotten. The antithesis of humanitarianism, the idea of […]
Derek Summerfield: NHS antidepressant prescribing—what do we get for £266 million per year?
The Royal College of Psychiatrists and the media routinely state that there is an “epidemic” of mental disorder—1 in 4 people in the UK, with 3 in 4 said not to get the treatment they need. These disease-mongering assertions have been recycled for so long that they have become unexamined societal truisms. We are apparently […]
Tom Jefferson and Peter Doshi: RIP PubMed commons
Four years ago, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a pilot project to “leverage the social power of the internet to encourage constructive criticism and high quality discussions.” The service allowed readers to post signed comments below any of the 28 million citations indexed in PubMed and was democratically dubbed “Commons”. But earlier this month, […]
Peter Brindley: The past just ain’t what it used to be
Peter Brindley contemplates how Victorian medicine and its failings holds up a mirror to medicine now […]