Recently the Wall Street Journal alerted its readers to a report by the ECRI Institute in the US on the common problem of patient misidentification. [1,2] The study found 7613 “wrong patient” incidents reported across 181 organizations in the period January 2013 to July 2015. Selecting the wrong electronic record was one example of this type of incident. […]
Category: Guest writers
Jamie Murdoch: Nurse or non-clinician in the delivery of telephone triage?
The question of who should triage patients over the phone is critical to delivering safe and effective care and has become a contentious issue for healthcare systems. Belgium is currently undergoing important changes in how it provides healthcare to patients in this respect. On 21 October 2016, Maggie De Block, the Belgian minister for health, […]
Trevor Plunkett: Dementia is not a disease
Recently I read in at least three daily newspapers that dementia is now the leading cause of death in the UK. It appears that such statements arise from figures supplied by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which wrote, “Dementia and Alzheimer’s (sic) has replaced ischaemic heart disease as the leading cause of death in […]
Sara Hamilton: Pioneering open heart surgery
My brother died in 1964 at Guy’s Hospital. He was 15, I was 12. He had a congenital heart problem which I believe was a ventricular septal defect. He was under the care of Lord Brock, a leading British chest and heart surgeon and one of the pioneers of modern open heart surgery. He had […]
Thushara Matthias: Caring for older patients
I’m a postgraduate trainee from a developing country and have completed my local training in internal and general medicine to be a consultant physician. The rest of my training involves mandatory “foreign training” in an overseas country of our choice for one year. In most cases, doctors from my region choose either the United Kingdom […]
Juliet Cohen: Proving torture–home office mistreatment of expert medical evidence
The encounter that changed my medical career was in 1990, with an interpreter working in a Red Cross clinic overseas. We had become friends over the weeks that I worked there and one day he showed me his application to be considered a refugee. He detailed the events leading to him having to flee his […]
Neel Sharma: Sayre’s law—any hope for change in academia?
“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake . . . that is why academic politics are so bitter.” Wallace Stanley Sayre Although I am just starting out, I have gained some experience in the world of academia. I was always drawn towards understanding why […]
Richard Lehman: Pre-diabetes: can prevention come too soon?
In the last fifty years, most people across the world have had more food to eat and less physical work to do. On the plus side, we are living longer—often much longer—than our immediate ancestors. On the minus side we are running higher levels of blood glucose. Overall, there is much to rejoice about. But […]
Indermeet Sawhney: Incapacitated patients and rights to liberty
Article 5 (4) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) underpins everyone’s right to liberty. This fundamental principle dictates the rights of patients under the statute of the UK Mental Health Act and the Mental Capacity Act Deprivation of Liberty. There are safeguards in both pieces of legislation to ensure patients are able to […]
Mary Higgins: Improving maternity care in partnership
When you start working in maternity care, whatever your job, people often think how happy it must be. Compared to other specialties, we are very privileged to have the joy of working with women who will normally have a good outcome. The majority of women who begin pregnancy fit and healthy will have a physiological […]