The village of Erice sits above the town of Trapani on top of a mountain about 750 metres above sea level in the north-west corner of Sicily (picture below). Its original name was Ἐρυξ, after the Sicilian king of that name, a son of Aphrodite and either Boutes, an Argonaut, or Poseidon, the god of […]
Zosia Kmietowicz: A charter for women who are pregnant in prison
It is 20 years since a TV documentary showed a British prisoner give birth while handcuffed to a prison guard. Anyone who remembers the images must be asking why a charter for improving the care of pregnant women in prison and their babies has just been launched. Surely this doesn’t happen anymore? According to Birth […]
Lawrence Loh: Public health and why terminology matters
As younger generations of physicians develop a newfound interest in the social determinants of health, public health has increasingly become a buzzword for providers to throw about. In the medical community, it is now more and more common to find someone who is “practising” public health. But are they? Having worked as a public health physician for five years, […]
Claire McDaniel and Daniel Marchalik: Considering patients’ stories through Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son
The Doctors’ Book Club Adam Johnson The Orphan Master’s Son After her son was arrested by the secret police, Anna Akhmatova spent seventeen months waiting outside the Leningrad prisons for news of his wellbeing. Standing next to scores of other women similarly hoping to hear that their loved ones were alive, Akhmatova composed “Requiem,” a lyrical […]
Evidence Live 2016: Promoting informed healthcare choices by helping people assess treatment claims
Iain Chalmers, Paul Glasziou, Douglas Badenoch, Patricia Atkinson, Astrid Austvoll-Dahlgren, and Andy Oxman. In the run up to Evidence Live 2016, we are running a series of blogs by the conference speakers discussing what they will be talking about at the conference. All of us are bombarded by treatment claims. These reach us through the […]
Suzanne Gordon: What we call healthcare professionals matters
The other day I attended a patient safety workshop at a major US hospital. The physicians and nurses, IT, and other quality and safety staff in the room were deeply concerned about the latest report in The BMJ documenting that 250,000 patients a year die from preventable errors, making this the third leading cause of […]
Tessa Richards: “Burnout shops” are bad for health
Burnout is a pervasive problem. Its high prevalence among health professionals is well recognised. But the extent of its impact on the quality, safety, and cost of patient care needs more scrutiny, agreed participants at the WELL-Med conference in Greece last week. “Fixing toxic workplaces rather than fixing the people” who suffer from working in them […]
Anne Marie Rafferty: Whose responsibility is the workforce anyway?
It’s the workforce stupid! That is the key message of the Nuffield Report, “Reshaping the workforce to deliver the care patients need.” Workforce solutions are rarely quick fixes so policy makers often find it is more appealing to introduce new types of workers rather than grind away at trying to make what we already have […]
Soumyadeep Bhaumik’s review of South Asian medical papers—May 2016
It is summer in South Asia, and it seems to be getting hotter than ever before (though I have been spared this year). Climate change is expected to have major consequences in the region with Bangladesh at the top of the risk index for global climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) […]
Neel Sharma: We need to understand the real life applications of technology in medical education
Technology as we all know has caused significant movement in medical education. In reality this was not a desire of our own as doctors, but was brought to us courtesy of the gaining popularity of technology use in everyday lives, from the rise of the internet, mobile devices, laptops, and social media. We then attempted […]