In subjecting the bureaucratic machine underpinning the NHS to ethical scrutiny, I suggest that we adhere to a basic premise: that it is ethically incumbent on a public health service to maximise the health and wellbeing of the population, within the constraints of the finite resources at its disposal. In my view we currently fall […]
Category: Guest writers
KM Venkat Narayan: Roads in India – a fast growing death trap
Today I received a sad email about a 24 year old family friend who died in a road traffic accident in Mumbai. Rohan Sardar skid on the road while riding his bike, suffered a head injury and, after much delay at the ill equipped, civic run Shatabdhi Hospital, was moved to Kokilabai Dhirubai Ambani Hospital […]
Nick Harvey: There’s now a cure for hepatitis C… but the poor can’t afford it
Picture the scenario: a disease is destroying your liver and there’s a chance you will die. There’s a cure, but you can’t have it as it costs more than you earn. There are tens of millions more of people like you. Hundreds of thousands of them die every year. It sounds like some sci-fi dystopia, […]
Jen Gunter: The Tamiflu talisman
Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) has been prescribed for my son, Oliver, multiple times. It’s possible he has taken this drug more than anyone. Oliver was born at 26 weeks gestation and was left with significant bronchopulmonary dysplasia. He also has a complex congenital heart disease, now partially repaired, but he is left with moderate pulmonary valve regurgitation […]
Jonathon Tomlinson: Moral luck, agent regret and the doctor as drug
“You saved my life, doctor. I can’t thank you enough.” Letter from Tom 2011 “Our mother is dead … because of you.” Bereaved daughter. Poplar coroner’s court 2010 “What is the drug you use with patients all the time?” “The doctor is the drug.” M Balint 1952 [1] Professional identity is particularly strong in doctors […]
Ryan Irwin: What healthcare can learn from football—10 key lessons
Football, the world’s most played sport, provides an excellent laboratory for understanding the nature of organisations and has some useful lessons for members of the healthcare economy. Here, 10 lessons are explored. 1. Culture is king Culture is the product of values, beliefs, and behaviours. Football clubs are synonymous with their own cultures, which when […]
Sue Macdonald: A parent’s view of cerebral palsy—20 years on
The other day I came across a personal view that I wrote 20 years ago just after learning that my baby son, Dominic, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The article made me cringe a bit, in the way that something written by your younger self invariably does. But the emotions I was trying to […]
Daniel Marchalik: Rethinking medical education—in defense of fiction
In the past decade, medicine has quickly entered a new era in which morning rounds take place in front of a computerized set of lab values and histories are taken from electronic medical records. As verbal exchanges and eye contact become increasingly rare, the patient, as described by Madeline Drexler, morphs into an “oddly invisible […]
Seye Abimbola and Aku Kwamie: Posting and transfer in the health sector
The things we don’t talk about in global health escape our attention perhaps because they don’t have a name—the unnamed subject being, in effect, a non-issue. From 3 to 7 February, a group of 19 researchers, decision-makers, and policy advocates from 12 countries gathered for a meeting at the […]
Simon Chapman: Will vapers really “quit and (not) die?”
The public health appeal of vaping that emboldens its advocates to sanctimoniously taunt anyone unconvinced by their evangelism as callous “quit or die” moralists is that e-cigarettes are spectacularly promising as a way of quitting smoking. Aware that many vapers also continue to smoke, they point to the seemingly undeniable logic of “every cigarette forgone […]