• The latest news article by Gareth Iacobucci reports that an additional £1bn in emergency deficit funds is now urgently needed by the NHS this year. In a recent review by the King’s Fund, it was found that the £8bn by 2020 pledged by the government would cover an “absolute minimum” of care and would not […]
Category: The BMJ today
The BMJ Today: Women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health
Global health experts warn that societies are failing women, children, and adolescents, particularly in the poorest communities around the world, and urgent action is needed to save lives and improve health. Our special cluster of 16 articles looks at the success or otherwise of millennium development goals 4 and 5 and finds vast inequalities between and within […]
The BMJ Today: A weekend of tweets
Last week Andrew Brown, obituaries editor at UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, gave a great talk to me and other colleagues at The BMJ about the Telegraph‘s approach to chronicling the lives of assorted establishment figures, rogues, villains, entertainers, and clergy. The Telegraph’s obituaries are legendary, and Andrew described how the title had historically used […]
The BMJ Today: Europe’s refugee crisis
The BMJ covers the refugee crisis with four recent articles. • Kamran Abbasi, Kiran Patel, and Fiona Godlee state that offering asylum is a minimum standard of civilised society. They say that Europe’s refugee crisis is the greatest test of humanity faced by the world’s rich countries this century. […]
The BMJ Today: Doing the right thing, doing the wrong thing, and the Hawthorne effect
• Samir Dawlatly explains in a blog the barriers that he faces daily as a practicing GP, which often hinder him from providing high quality healthcare. He gives the example of a patient presenting with tiredness and says that, under pressure, it is much more difficult and time consuming to explain why blood tests aimed at […]
The BMJ Today: Diagnostic challenges and telemedicine
• Pleural effusions present a common diagnostic problem: there are over 50 known causes. A clinical review describes how a primary care physician and a specialist can approach patients with pleural effusion to reach an etiologic diagnosis using clinical features, imaging, fluid analysis, and pleural biopsy. It also presents strategies to manage the breathlessness that afflicts patients […]
The BMJ Today: The migration crisis, vaccine safety, and assisted dying
• The migration crisis and health in Europe Providing preventive care to “irregular migrants”—that is, those who do not have full legal status—as opposed to waiting until a condition must be treated as an emergency, not only improves people’s health but could also save money. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights studied this in the settings […]
The BMJ Today: Three views on the “weekend effect”
• Updated analysis of weekend hospital admissions Nick Freemantle and colleagues report on an update of their 2010 study of all NHS hospital admissions in England which showed that admission at the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) was associated with an increased risk of in-hospital death compared with midweek admission. Their new analysis on 2014 data […]
The BMJ Today: Online medical records, confusing mortality figures, and deciding not to quit
• Patients promised online access to their medical records by 2018 Today, The BMJ carries the news that England’s health secretary Jeremy Hunt has pledged that all patients in England will be able to access and input into their own medical records from any location in the country by 2018. As part of an ambitious […]
The BMJ Today: Where now for seven day services?
• What next for contract negotiations? As the deadline by which health secretary Jeremy Hunt (pictured) said he would impose new contracts on junior doctors and consultants approaches, Abi Rimmer and Ingrid Torjesen asked a range of consultants, trainees, trust medical directors, and negotiators what should happen next. […]