The Duchess of Cambridge’s support for children’s mental health at the beginning of the first Children’s Mental Health Week was welcome, necessary, and urgent. At a time when austerity measures are impacting on so many services, it is vital to have such endorsement; the evidence for children’s mental health services is solid and compelling and […]
Samir Dawlatly: Burnt out or boiled alive
The cleaner popped his head round the door, “You nearly finished, doc? Or are you happy to lock up?” The GP glanced at the bottom right corner of the glowing monitor that he had been looking at for the last two hours since the last patient left. “No, I’m fine thanks,” he answered, “I’m happy […]
Emma Rourke on why we need to GULP
Last week, Food Active, based in Liverpool and funded by the North West Directors of Public Health, launched a campaign encouraging people to Give Up Loving Pop—or GULP. To gulp something implies urgency and hunger, and it’s certainly true that UK consumers possess an insatiable desire for the fizzy stuff, each putting away an average […]
The BMJ Today: The perils of whistleblowing and the Russian roulette of NHS management
Here’s a flavour of what’s new on thebmj.com today. Features • Why would a hospital consultant go into management? Taking the job of NHS trust chief executive requires a doctor to ditch job security, probably earn less money, and be saddled with problems they don’t have the power to solve, finds Richard Vize. Dr Mark Newbold, […]
David Zigmond: The extinction of care by treatment—our healthcare’s heart failure
At the end of last year, the media had a brief frisson over another dark story from our NHS: seven recent suicides and one homicide involving people who were acutely mentally ill. The transient newsworthiness came from the probability that the deaths were preventable: psychiatric beds were sought for these patients, but none were available. […]
Richard Smith: A global university for healthcare workers
WHO estimates that the world is short of 12.9 million healthcare workers, and Devi Shetty, the cardiac surgeon and chairman and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals, thinks that radical steps are needed to provide these workers. Money for healthcare for all will come, he believes, but it cannot be achieved unless healthcare workers are available […]
Richard Smith: Surgeons spend their time putting a price tag on human life
Physicians and surgeons across Asia, Africa, and Latin America spend their time putting a price tag on human life, said Devi Shetty, cardiac surgeon and chairman and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals, at the World Summit on Innovation in Heath in Doha last week. His mission is to reduce the costs of health to make […]
The BMJ Today: Women’s satisfaction with pain relief during labour
Good morning. Here’s what is new in The BMJ. Research • Analgesics in labour. Are women more satisfied with pain relief obtained through a patient controlled device delivering remifentanil or epidural analgesia? Dutch researchers report on a head to head randomised trial comparing the two treatments. News • Avoidable deaths. Improper monitoring and other errors […]
Elizabeth Loder on the proliferation of medical research reporting guidelines: A checklist too far?
If reporting guidelines and checklists are the answer, what is the problem? That’s easy: their development was motivated by the realization that critical information was vague, missing, or misreported in an unacceptably high proportion of published medical research papers. Reporting guidelines take aim at this problem by specifying a minimum set of items that should […]
Kallur Suresh on the portrayal of young onset Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice
Imagine you’re a world renowned professor of linguistics at New York’s Columbia University. You’ve written game changing books on how children develop their language proficiency in early life and are regularly invited to give scholarly lectures in academic institutions worldwide. You’re at the peak of your academic career, but start to notice that you struggle […]