The underlying concept of screening is that an early detection of risk factors or disease is beneficial for the clinical or public health outcome. Patients, physicians, and public health authorities have had high expectations for this concept. Unfortunately, some of the hopes for screening have turned out to be false hopes after critical, scientific assessment. Lifestyle medicine […]
Ceinwen Giles: Patient leaders at the NHS Confederation Conference
As readers of The BMJ will know, leadership is a widely discussed and hotly debated topic across the NHS at the moment. It’s also a theme that permeated the NHS Confederation Conference in Liverpool last week. Of particular interest to me was the issue of patient leadership, as I was asked to speak at a […]
Azeem Majeed: Are federations the way forward for general practices in England?
As general practices in England come under increasing workload, funding, and contractual pressures, a new type of primary care organisation—the GP Federation—is becoming more common. The RCGP defines GP federations as practices “working together to share resources, expertise, and services.” In their simplest form, federations allow the general practices in one locality to share some […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—9 June 2014
NEJM 5 Jun 2014 Vol 370 2169 There is a story that when new antibiotics were arriving every few weeks in the late 1950s, drug companies had a hard time thinking up new names for them, all ending in mycin. So they started using a word generating machine, but stopped when it came up with […]
The BMJ Today: Dying to talk about it—care and conversations near the end of life
Why do we find it so difficult to talk about dying? A question that palliative care specialists, such as Scott Murray and Kirsty Boyd, have been asking ever more urgently as populations age and the need for a good death (after a healthy life) moves higher up the healthcare agenda. It’s not hard to find evidence of […]
Ahmed Rashid: Can we ever be “just friends” with big pharma?
It’s been less than a decade since I started medical school and even in my short career the relationship between doctors and the drug industry has undergone drastic change. During undergraduate clinical placements, I spent many lunchtimes making polite conversation about a drug I had no interest in to justify scoffing the indulgent Waitrose sandwiches […]
Ma Zhen-Sheng et al: How can violence against doctors in China be prevented?
On 10 January 2014, a four year old female was hospitalized with fever in the department of pediatrics of Xi’an Central Hospital in Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province, and was discharged after six days of treatment. She was readmitted to the hospital with pneumonia two days following discharge, and was subsequently transferred to Xi’an Pediatric Hospital […]
Bev Fitzsimons: Practical tools to improve patients’ experience
At the King’s Fund, we have spoken a lot about the benefits of collective leadership lately. With the challenges currently facing the NHS, leaders at all levels across organisations need to learn to work together with a shared vision of providing care. Leadership needs to be distributed throughout organisations, working alongside patients, rather than concentrated […]
The BMJ Today: The dangers of anal sex, ensuring service redesign is evidence based, and the EMA taken to task over data disclosure
There are some topics that the British just don’t like to talk about, and bottoms, bowel habits, and anal sex fall firmly into that category—even when the conversation is with their GP. But these conversations are necessary. The latest statistics from Cancer Research UK show that rates of anal cancer in the UK have increased […]
Richard Lehman: The Medical Reformation
The Reformation that we know best began some time after the year 1500, but had its roots in a technological revolution, which took place 50 years earlier—the invention of the printing press. Then (1450-1500): Thanks to the printing press, the Holy Scriptures became widely available in Latin. But ordinary people could not read them, and […]