Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
“Competition in health care should be tactical not ideological.” That was the main message from a recent debate on “Competition versus integration in the NHS” organised by the Cambridge Health Network and the King’s Fund. In case you haven’t heard of the Cambridge Health Network, it might crudely and unkindly be described as the opposition […]
“There’s a 50% chance that humans will be extinct by the end of the century because of climate change,” said Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health, at last week’s conference on environmental sustainability. I’d heard that before, but it made me think of my daughter, who can expect to live for […]
The world is on the cusp of a major epidemic of breast cancer, said Peter Boyle, head of the international prevention research institute in Lyon, France, at a conference on breast cancer in Oman last weekend. The incidence of breast cancer has tripled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again by […]
“There are five things about the NHS that are not sustainable,” said Phil Morley, chief executive of Hull and East Yorkshire Trust, in the middle of a conference last week on sustainability and health. He spoke like Cicero, only with more humour and a strong Northern accent. The conference was about environmental sustainability, but Morley […]
“We live in a world of competing sorrows,” said Daniel Moynihan, the US senator. We also live in a world of competing agendas, and the NHS has to think about saving money, increasing productivity, improving quality and access, and many other issues as well as achieving environmental sustainability. And despite their fine words, the health […]
I’m trying to organise a workshop on “implementation research,” and I find that the concept is as hard to pin down as poetry. Might you be able to help me? The overall idea behind implementation research is not hard to identify. It’s about trying to make sure that the results of research are applied in […]
An interesting article in Nature gives what may be a glimpse of the future of scientific discourse by telling stories of how social media have done a much better and faster job than traditional prepublication review. Science recently published a paper in which researchers claimed to be able to predict human longevity with 77% accuracy. The […]
A Spanish friend who is a pharmacist and basic scientist and with whom I have a spirited argument over the polypill has emailed me to gloat over the press reports derived from a Cochrane review that statins provide no benefit for healthy people. She believes that healthy living will suffice for fending off heart attacks […]
Wellness, whatever it might be, is an emerging market, and there is serious money to be made. This was the main message from last night’s meeting of the Cambridge Health Network, a thriving network where men in expensive suits and smartly dressed women, most of whom are consultants and CEOs of companies, mix with public […]
Growth in spend on healthcare grew faster than growth in the gross domestic product in every OECD country between 2000 and 2008. That’s the main reason why every country, including Britain, is trying some form of health reform. The growth in spend on healthcare is unsustainable, and, as I’ve joked before, the US may be […]