We need to make it easier for people with mental illnesses to enter and stay in work […]
Wendy Burn: Prioritising the mental health of staff must be beyond question
Category: Guest writers
Doctors of the World: Vulnerable people should not fear arrest when seeking healthcare
“Universal health coverage is a human right.” This was a welcome statement from the new Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. [1] Europe, as one of the most affluent parts of the world with an admirable history of social protection and welfare states, should be leading the way in ensuring […]
Robert Kemp and Vinay Prasad: Should we accept higher p values than 0.05 for new cancer drugs?
The current regulatory system already tolerates a tremendous amount of uncertainty regarding cancer drugs in the real world and does not need more […]
Ollie Minton et al: Learning from deaths
The media have a longstanding interest in “avoidable deaths” in hospital. Recently, a particular reporting focus was on variation in mortality at the weekend. Predictably, this caused major controversy. Most care given in hospitals is to use the CQC’s jargon—“safe and effective.” Undoubtedly, there are systemic problems that influence outcomes and mortality, and occasionally things […]
Joanna Erdman: The global abortion policies database—legal knowledge as a health intervention
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar died in an Irish hospital from miscarriage complications after being refused an abortion. The treating physicians believed that because the fetus still had a beating heart their “hands were tied.” Under Irish law, abortion is a criminal offence unless necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman, yet there is […]
Interpersonal, collective, and extremist violence are public health problems
Violence increasingly dominates the news. Be it sexual abuse of children, violence against women, alcohol-fuelled nightlife violence, or the pervasive threat of terrorism; each leaves victims suffering life-long harms, impacts the mental health of whole communities, and (regardless of positive political rhetoric) limits individuals’ freedom to enjoy public and private spaces. Improved knowledge on the […]
Ana Rosengurtt: Uruguay’s mandatory breast cancer screening is challenged
In 2006, it became mandatory for all women aged 40-59 in Uruquay to have a free mammography every two years, despite its National Cancer Registry showing a sustained decrease in breast cancer mortality since 1990 [1]. President Tabaré Vázquez, an oncologist by profession, instigated this. But, as previously reported in The BMJ: “It’s the only country […]
Miriam Fine-Goulden: Unmeasured interventions
For my next job application, ask me how I make people feel, because that’s what you really need to know […]
Fiona Sim: Obesity—personal responsibility or environmental curse?
To place all of the blame on the individual is to completely ignore the very real power of our surroundings […]
Sebastian Walsh: Do more with the students who come to our wards
When revising for medical school finals I used lists. Lists and lists of conditions, many of them rare, and many of which I hadn’t seen in practice yet. One such condition was Churg-Strauss syndrome, also known as eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA). Four years on from finals my memory only stretches as far as remembering […]