Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
In the 1980s people in prison received a second class health service despite having a high prevalence of health problems. I visited many prisons at that time and wrote a series of articles for The BMJ. In those days the Prison Medical Service was part of the Home Office, and there was an argument that […]
All health systems need clinical leaders to flourish, but being a clinical leader is hard, particularly in the NHS. Those were the main messages from a recent meeting of the Cambridge Health Network. The reason we need clinical leaders, said Jonathan Fielden, currently medical director of University College London, but about to become director of specialist […]
I’m much amused by the pious positions taken by researchers and BMJ editors in the spirited dispute over qualitative research. The researchers are upset that The BMJ largely excludes qualitative research, and the editors insist that they do so to provide readers with research more likely to be useful to them. Both sides have hidden, […]
The recent discovery of gravitational waves allows a whole new way of seeing the Universe. With some similarities the recognition that the world is much more complicated and unpredictable than researchers thought opens up the possibility of an effective response to the global pandemic of obesity. That’s what Boyd Swinburn, professor of population nutrition and […]
“The NHS is under tremendous pressure,” I tell a novelist friend. “Could it die?” he asks. “I suppose it could.” “How would that happen?” How would it happen? That’s a hard question. I didn’t have a convincing answer, but it’s a question worth examining. I trotted out to my novelist friend my usual reference by […]
The H in NHS stands not for hospital or healthcare but health, and the NHS needs to do better at promoting health, said Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, this week at a meeting organised by the University of Southampton. If England can’t do better at prevention then the NHS will be overwhelmed, said […]
In my 40 years of messing around with medical journals I’ve tried to contribute to promoting patient safety and the use of evidence. Generally things seem better from a time when patient safety was largely ignored and evidence used haphazardly rather than systematically, but I fret now that doctors are using both safety and evidence […]
Parliament has three times relegislated the commissioner provider split—in 1990, 2002, and 2012, said Stephen Dorrell, secretary of state for health from 1995-97, in a talk to the Imperial College Centre for Health Policy this week. Every health secretary for the past 26 years—with the exception of Frank Dobson—has believed in commissioning. But, he asked, […]
My mother, who has had no short term memory for nine years, has lived in a nursing home for almost three years. I visit her most weeks, but I constantly fret if I should visit her more or less. What, I ask you, reader, is the way to calculate the right amount of time to […]
Around 4000 people a day visit El Museo De Las Momias (The Mummy Museum) in Guanjuato, making it one of the most popular tourist sites in Mexico. Some queue for an hour or more. Why do they go? Why did I go with my family? The museum contains about 100 mummies. These are not mummies […]