A recent article in The BMJ on the crisis in evidence based medicine (EBM) did a great job of both summarizing challenges that have developed over the past 20 years, and proposing some ways forward in delivering better evidence based care to our patients. Unfortunately, I think one piece of the evidence based puzzle is still […]
Category: Patient perspectives
Tessa Richards: Health 2.0—new technologies and e-patients
“All changed, changed utterly.” W B Yeats’s famous line was triggered by the Irish rebellion in 1916. Close to 100 years on, it could describe how digital technologies and social media are changing the world; not least the world of healthcare. At the Doctors 2.0 & You conference—launched and led by Denise Silber, a Paris […]
Angela Coulter: Person centred care—what works?
“There’s no evidence that it works.” In these days of evidence based medicine, that’s a real clincher—a good reason to avoid a treatment or procedure that offers no proven value. But can we take it on trust that those making this assertion have a good grasp of the evidence, or could this be simply an […]
Ceinwen Giles: Patient leaders at the NHS Confederation Conference
As readers of The BMJ will know, leadership is a widely discussed and hotly debated topic across the NHS at the moment. It’s also a theme that permeated the NHS Confederation Conference in Liverpool last week. Of particular interest to me was the issue of patient leadership, as I was asked to speak at a […]
Bev Fitzsimons: Practical tools to improve patients’ experience
At the King’s Fund, we have spoken a lot about the benefits of collective leadership lately. With the challenges currently facing the NHS, leaders at all levels across organisations need to learn to work together with a shared vision of providing care. Leadership needs to be distributed throughout organisations, working alongside patients, rather than concentrated […]
Neal Maskrey: Seeing the world through a patient’s eyes
Captain Hawkeye Pierce of the 4077th MASH unit is one of the great fictional doctors. Battered by the US army, and brutalised by death and disfigurement in a war far from home, he made mistakes, he was human, he cared. We laughed, cried, and loved him. Alan Alda and the rest of the cast of […]
Judith Hibbard: How do people become good managers of their own health?
Within the general population some people actively focus on reaching and maintaining good health, while others are more passive about the whole thing. So what makes the difference? Is learning to manage your health like learning a country’s geography—where all you probably need are a list of facts and a good reference guide? Or is […]
Tessa Richards: The right to be supported to self manage disease
On the eve of the EU elections, reports and manifestos aimed at attracting the attention of newly elected MEPs and commission officials have been flowing thick and fast. A new one shortly to be added to their list has the working title, “Empowered patients are a resource not a cost.” It will set out recommendations […]
Tessa Richards: “All I ask is that you listen”
If healthcare was a patient, the diagnosis would be multimorbidity. There is a near terminal mix of fragmentation of services, failure to listen and respond to patients concerns, lack of compassion, patchy performance on protecting and promoting health, and unsustainably high costs. Simplistic perhaps, but fighting talk galvanises. Maureen Bisognano, president of the Institute of […]
Tessa Richards: It’s time to turn healthcare upside down
March sees the picturesque town of Basel transformed as it celebrates Fastnacht. Masks are donned, people pour into the streets to the sound of piccolos and drums, and party. Transformation was very much on the minds of the 300 participants from 22 countries who walked over confetti strewn streets to the town’s spanking white congress […]