I attended the annual convention of the German Society of Internal Medicine DGIM (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Innere Medizin) in Mannheim this week. The main focus of this congress is transferring knowledge from bench to bedside and a large proportion of participants are primarily clinicians. I was interested to see that a BMJ topic was one […]
Meena Putturaj: The art of data collection in health systems research
Data collection is a crucial aspect of any research project. Depending on the nature and scope of the research question, collecting quality data requires considerable investment of time and resources. Indeed, any research endeavour is handicapped without the relevant data. During a recent health systems research project, I had to collect a lot of information […]
Robert A Watson: Challenges and opportunities for emergency general surgery
Emergency general surgery (EGS) in England is facing a number of challenges, including workforce, training, and operational issues. Together these have led to wide national variation in outcomes. For example, mortality for emergency laparotomy can range from 3.6 to 41.7 per cent depending on location of treatment; [1] but establishing effective ways to address such […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—11 April 2016
NEJM 7 April 2016 Vol 374 Prebirth steroids and baby lungs 1311 Most of you will be familiar with the logo of the Cochrane Collaboration, consisting of a blue circle with a vertical line crossed by some bars with a diamond shape at the bottom. This is the forest plot of Iain Chalmers et al’s […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Mechanisms
Invited last week to the MuST9 philosophy conference—Evidence, Inference, and Risk, in the Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians Universität, the ninth in a series held in turn in Munich, Sydney, and Tilburg (hence the name)—I mused on the definition of mechanism, particularly in relation to physiology and pharmacology. In my general approach […]
Xiaoning Zhang: The two child policy in China
For the past thirty seven years the Chinese government has carried out a strict one child policy. In 2015 the policy was phased out, and a two child policy was introduced. The national implementation of the two child policy could reform and improve family planning service management and promote the balanced development of the population. […]
Richard Smith: Medicine’s need for philosophy
The commonest undergraduate degree of students entering the medical school at University of California Irvine is philosophy. The medical school, traditionally the richest and most arrogant of university departments, has at UC Irvine reached out to the philosophy department for help. At a conference there last month I met a student who is simultaneously studying […]
Are safety measures really the answer to spiralling clinical negligence costs?
Aviation, rail, and oil and gas industries pride themselves, for good reason, on their safety records and associated culture. And a logical extension of the success of those industries is to apply similar approaches to medicine, with the aim of reducing risk. Instinctively, that makes sense—make medicine safer and there will be fewer errors, saving […]
Soumyadeep Bhaumik’s review of South Asian medical papers—April 2016
Despite the enormous diversity that South Asia encompasses, it has its fair share of common problems in which there is a need for greater co-operation and learning. A key issue is the neglected problem of arsenic groundwater contamination. A study from the Gangetic plains of India found that 100% of the samples analyses had higher […]
Claudia Pagliari et al: Smartening-up NHS workforce management with IT
Media revelations of dramatic unexpected shortages in NHS nursing capacity, excessive dependence on overseas recruitment and costly agency staff (often NHS workers doing private shifts) are contributing to the public perception of a health service that doesn’t know how to effectively plan and manage its workforce. […]