On Monday I was at a meeting with Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon, illustrating my global significance. […]
Richard Smith on why the private sector is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals
Category: Guest writers
Tony Waterston on reaching a common view on Israel and Palestine
Anyone writing a piece on either Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories (the official UN title) will be exposed to a wealth comments from each side with often, little appearance of understanding the other’s perspective. This was my experience following a previous BMJ blog on 5th January. […]
Sara McCafferty on priority setting
In October last year we announced the UK Forum on Health Care Priority Setting at the 7th meeting of the International Society on Priorities in Health Care. The forum is funded by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and is organised by the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University. […]
Demand online access to your medical records, says Richard Smith
I’ve just emailed my GP asking her to give me online access to my medical records. It was quite a palaver as I couldn’t find her email address, or the email address of the practice after searching on Google, and the practice doesn’t seem to have a website. Eventually I had to ring. […]
Richard Smith on barriers to writing and getting published for authors from low income countries
While teaching two courses on “getting published” in Dhaka I had a marvellous opportunity to gather insights into why researchers from a low income country have problems writing and getting published. Most of the researchers were juniors from ICDDR, B (formerly the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), a well established and highly successful […]
Tauseef Mehrali on war and medicine
My practice recently revamped its provision of short-notice medical appointments by transforming the Emergency Surgery into the (so far so good) Rapid Access Surgery. In essence, patients can now no longer pitch up to the practice between 11 am and 12 noon and definitely see a doctor regardless of their complaint, or lack thereof. […]
Julian Sheather: “Surgeon’s Hall” – On art, medicine and gender
It is fairly widely accepted that medicine is both a science and an art, that it lays claim to a rigorous evidence-based method, while recognising the impact of irreducibly human capacities on healing, capacities like emotion and belief that do not fit easily into a world of verifiability and fact. As a science it aspires […]
A day in the life of an MSF doctor
This evening I am pretty tired again. January and December tend to be the busiest months for the Emergency Unit and there have been a higher percentage than normal of really sick HDU/ITU type cases lately. The days are pretty unpredictable, like A&E at home. The numbers may not seem that high on paper, but […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the US stimulus bill
While Tom Daschle waits another week for his confirmation as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, health reform has got underway without him in the form of the stimulus bill. The bill that is currently working its way through Congress falls just short of $900 billion in tax cuts and spending. Principally, it is […]
William Lee on “A Short Stay In Switzerland”
Last night the BBC aired “A Short Stay in Switzerland”, a one-off drama based on the true story of a terminally ill doctor who killed herself in Zurich with the help of Dignitas, an organisation specialising in assisting suicide (read obituary). Assisting a person to commit suicide is illegal in the UK, though there have […]