Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
I fully support the Alltrials campaign to see all clinical trials published, and I’m a signature to the letter of people who have participated in trials and are horrified that their trial might not have been published. The results of my trial were published, but signing the letter caused me to remember projects that I’d […]
Last month some 500 of us gathered in Bologna to remember Alessandro Liberati, founder of the Italian Cochrane Centre, a great thinker about health, and a personal friend to most of the 500. As I’ve described in a previous blog, the day was built around Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which discussed […]
How many of us can expect a year after we die to have some 500 people attend a meeting to celebrate our life, discuss our work, and think about the future agenda that flows from our work? “Almost none of us” is the answer, but it happened for Alessandro Liberati in Bologna in December. Most […]
“The government wants to sell our personal data to the highest bidder, and it stinks,” said somebody, making her position very clear, at a meeting at the House of Commons organised by the Industry and Parliament Trust on making anonymised NHS data widely available. (I can’t tell you who made the statement as the meeting […]
The characteristics of health systems are complexity, uncertainty, opacity, poor measurement, variability in decision making, asymmetry of information, conflict of interest, and corruption. They are thus largely a black box and uncontrollable, said Gianfranco Domenighetti of the Università della Svizzera Italiana at a meeting in Bologna on La Sanità tra Ragione e passione (Health through […]
Every 36 hours the NHS treats a million people. Across the world there are billions of interactions between patients and health systems every year. Each of those patients is a “case,” and the potential learning from those cases is huge. Unfortunately most of the learning is lost, unrecorded and unshared. But now the launching of […]
The idea has long been around that instead of submitting your paper to one journal you should auction it to the highest bidder. Today I did it. As we all know, getting published in high impact journals is crucial for academics. It shouldn’t be that way, and it’s wholly unscientific to use the impact factor […]
Europe has started 187 programmes to prevent diabetes, but fewer than 10 survived to the end of funding, said Peter Schwarz from Dresden, at the World Congress on Prevention of Diabetes in Madrid earlier this month. Of the 150 million people in Europe at risk of diabetes only a very few are reached by prevention […]
“There is no kingdom too small for a doctor to be king of,” is one of my favourite sayings. Last week at a workshop for patient organisations organised by the Medtronic Foundation I learnt that it may be even more true for patient organisations. I’m a big supporter of patient organisations. They do an important […]
“I’ve been lobbied. I am a lobbyist. Lobbying is not a dirty word. It’s a fundamental part of the political process. You should be a lobbyist.” This is how David Bowe, a former Member of the European Parliament and now a professional lobbyist, opened his talk at the Medtronic’s Foundation workshop in Brussels on patient […]