The third Basic Surgical Skills Course for Palestinian trainees at Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH) in East Jerusalem concluded on a hot afternoon last week. The major achievement this year was the involvement of senior Palestinian surgeons from West Bank, East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza, in delivering some of the teaching sessions. All the teaching […]
Category: Guest writers
Peter Bailey: Galley slaves, rebel!
Jeremy Hunt’s speech to the King’s Fund on 23 May made me wonder if someone in the Department of Health had had an “Oh my God!” moment. A gut clenching, awful realisation that a catastrophic mistake has been made. A mistake that spells misery, shame, and horrible consequence. The sort of feeling you get when […]
Martin Roland: Reorganising GP care—back to the future
There seemed something familiar about the secretary of state’s announcements about general practice last week. Jeremy Hunt says that care is too often disjointed and he wants to give GPs responsibility for bringing it back together. I wonder how that could be done. Maybe community nurses could be practice based. Why not health visitors? Or […]
Tara Lamont: Finding things to stop doing…the inverse evidence law?
Early exponents of evidence based medicine put forward an optimistic view of future healthcare, where the availability of robust information would allow clinicians to select the most effective treatments—and to stop doing things that were shown not to work. But this last part has proved elusive. A recent paper by Sarah Garner and colleagues from […]
Magdalena Kincaid: Basic surgical training on the Mount of Olives
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd) team has been here before, yet nothing from past experience can possibly prepare for being swept up by overwhelming excitement of entering the Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH) on the Mount of Olives, towering over East Jerusalem. AVH is our host again for the third Basic Surgical Skills […]
Margaret McCartney: Clinical trial company tempts patients with free health screening
When buses in Glasgow started to come with posters asking if people were “Concerned about diabetes?” with an image of an older woman, a freephone number, and webpage for people “to find out about our health screening programme,” I wondered what was going on. Another bus advert said, “Do you have asthma? Register for a […]
Naohiro Yonemoto: Japan welcomes new international research collaboration
The first Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials (COMET) workshop in Japan took place, in April 2013, at Kyoto University, stimulating debate about how the Japanese research and practice community might engage with this international initiative and make use of core outcome sets. Toshiaki Furukawa (Professor and Chair, Department of Health Promotion and Human Behaviour […]
Tony Waterston: Why can’t we stop nuclear weapons?
Doctors first started to speak out about the health impact of nuclear weapons way back in 1980; the BMA published The Medical Effects of Nuclear weapons in 1983 and it was in 1985 that International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in publicising what nuclear […]
Mary Madden: Should we assume medical devices work until proven otherwise?
Low standards of evidence for medical device regulation in Europe have led to clinical concerns about the potential dangers posed by the highest risk (class III) devices, especially implantable devices [1, 2]. In the wake of hip and breast implant scandals [3, 4] and in the midst of growing concerns about the widespread acceptance of […]
Damien Brown: Working for MSF in South Sudan
My second day in South Sudan, the start of a nine month posting with MSF in this war torn, dustbowl of a town called Nasir, and I’m standing here in the medical ward, utterly lost. In every sense of the word. How did previous doctors manage the workload out here? I’ve got no idea. In […]