It is 11.59 pm and there is an eerie silence. All afternoon, sirens were wailing relentlessly outside my window, pushing through Red Sox traffic to reach Boylston Street ten minutes round the corner where, at around three o’clock, two explosions hit the city. Today (15th April 2013) is Patriot’s Day, a commemoration of the opening […]
Category: Guest writers
Richard Smith: Memories of Thatcher
My early years at the BMJ were very bound up with Margaret Thatcher. I started as an assistant editor a month before she became prime minister in 1979 and was appointed editor just before she was dethroned as prime minister in 1990. Whatever I write about her will evoke fury in some quarter, and despite […]
Richard Smith: Is email work?
“Email is not work. It’s a distraction.” So said a fierce, bearded lecturer at a talk I attended recently. Is he right? I have every reason to think him wrong because I tend to start every day by answering my emails—after looking at the BBC News website, Twitter, and Facebook, always in that order. I […]
David Lock: “Privatisation regulations” mean big change
It is not every day that the Department of Health produces a formal response to two of my dry (and I accept potentially fairly boring) legal opinions. 23 March was a red letter day because it was the first time it has happened. The department produced a formal response to material I and my fellow barrister, Ligia […]
Kailash Chand: Withdraw section 75 regulations
Last month the UK government released its amended regulations on NHS procurement after considerable outrage from health organisations, trade unions, and parliamentarians, over what appeared to be clear breaches of agreements. Is it a merely a cosmetic re-write of regulation 75 again that seeks merely to better disguise the true privatising aim of these regulations, or […]
Saurabh Gupta: Are doctors perpetual soft targets?
I recently read an article about a study in the US journal Demography on skewed sex ratios prevalent in India among the children of doctors. It mentioned that out of a sample of doctor couples (946 nuclear families with 1,624 children), the child sex ratio was 907 girls per 1 000 boys. This is below the Indian […]
Desmond O’Neill: Fresh approaches to long term care medicine in Washington, DC
Washington in spring is a visual treat, the spectacular arrays of cherry trees in bloom adding a frothy filigree to the sober magnificence of the iconic National Mall. Throw in blue skies and crisp spring weather, and it is not surprising that crowds flock to its Cherry Blossom Festival at weekends in March and April. […]
Richard Smith: Should the first priority of the NHS be to stop us dying or to help us die well?
Good Friday is an excellent day for thinking about death, but I think about death every day. I find it energising. As I write this blog on Easter Sunday, I read that Bruce Keogh, the medical director of NHS England, thinks that the first priority if the NHS is to stop us dying. Minutes after reading […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Research misconduct, actually
This month the open access journal with the highest impact factor: PLoS Med (short for Public Library of Science Medicine) will publish a set of articles on research misconduct. The main articles are broken down into research misconduct in high-income countries and research misconduct in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). I am second author […]
David Lock: A new and very different type of NHS in England
April 1 2013 saw the launch of a very different type of NHS in England. The current government has grappled with the same problems as all previous governments, but imposed radical surgery on an ageing patient. The previous government struggled with the problem of getting improved productivity and common high standards out of a largely […]