What have we done? We have over-intellectualised health. We—the youthful, affluent, busy, well educated elite—run the NHS as we would want for ourselves. We think of how we would choose to get our hernia “fixed” by the best possible surgeon at a time of convenience before going back to work. As an orthopaedic surgeon, I […]
Last year the King’s Fund ran an essay competition for contributions to its series “the NHS if,” exploring hypothetical futures for the health service. Here, we publish the runner-up entry. Read the winning entry here […]
England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has just announced that from April this year, overseas patients will be charged upfront for non-urgent NHS care. Whenever a new government NHS policy hits the headlines, the next task is to discover the story that they wanted to bury. I have previously written about health tourism and asking patients […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. When I first visited Dumfries in 1980, the new hospital was only five years old. I enthused over it, but now […]
Doctors have to make difficult clinical judgements about their patients on a daily basis and are trained to do so. This decision making develops with experience and the profession balances risk versus benefit on a case by case basis. Decision making, however, has changed rapidly over the last year with the added pressures brought on by the […]
During the past year we have become increasingly aware of the pressures facing frontline clinicians working in acute hospitals. Each of us spent time in 2016 shadowing a general physician on their ward round to gain an understanding of work at the sharp end of acute medicine in an NHS trust rated as “outstanding” by […]
The long awaited Brexit White Paper has finally appeared. Yet Martin McKee finds it fails to shed any light on how Brexit’s consequences for health (or much else) will be addressed. […]
The GMC is consulting on plans to develop a medical licensing assessment (MLA) that will assure and showcase the quality of medical education and practice across the UK. The thinking behind a single objective assessment for those wishing to practise medicine in the UK stems from current piecemeal arrangements. These not only provide differing levels […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. There are nine community hospitals across Dumfries and Galloway, and I visited the one in Kirkudbright, which is GP led. The […]
Since 2004 NHS emergency departments in the UK have been set “the four hour target.” The time from arrival to discharge and transfer out of the department should be no longer than four hours for all patients attending an emergency department. Initially 98%, it was lowered to 95% in 2010, and on 9 January 2017 the health […]