“If you miss the poor, you’ve missed the point,” said Margaret Mungherera in her recent inaugural speech as incoming president of the World Medical Association. She urged doctors around the world to advocate on behalf of the poor. If any delegates from the Hong Kong Medical Association, a WMA member, were present I do hope […]
Richard Vize: The only chance for GPs to lead the NHS
Just seven months ago, GP commissioners were poised to lead a clinically driven revolution in the NHS. Their deep understanding of the needs of patients and ability to eyeball hospital clinicians on service quality were billed as the levers for radical improvements. But there is a grave danger that much of the early ambition around […]
Trish Groves: Postpublication review—what role should journals play?
The National Center for Biotechnology Information of the US National Library of Medicine has emerged from the US shutdown with a new service: PubMed Commons. It’s a system for commenting on published articles, though at this stage it’s running as a closed pilot. Hilda Bastian of PubMed Health reckons it could become “one of the […]
Mary E Black: Save our national statistics
That old chestnut about “lies, damned lies and statistics” always raises a laugh. But something is about to happen that is not funny at all. The Office for National Statistics has published a consultation on proposals to STOP producing a wide range of statistics related to health and health inequalities. This is an important issue […]
Ellen Collins on funder priorities for open access
In the last two years, UK policy has taken a clear turn towards open access. With the aim of making published, peer-reviewed research outputs available to anybody who wants to read them, the open access movement has been around for a while. But 2012’s Finch Review, commissioned by David Willetts and accepted by him on […]
Unni Karunakara and Jean-Christophe Dollé: The limits of humanitarian aid—MSF and TB in Somalia
On 14 August 2013, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) took one of the most difficult decisions in our history and closed all of our medical humanitarian aid operations in Somalia after more than 22 years of assisting people who have suffered decades of war, epidemics, man-made and natural disasters. […]
Khaled E Emam: Anonymisation and creepy analytics
When health data is shared for secondary purposes, such as for research, there is always the concern about patient privacy. Data custodians want to at least meet the requirements in their relevant laws and regulations. One option for sharing data is to anonymize it beforehand. But anonymization does not protect against stigmatizing analytics, which are […]
Edward Davies: Obamacare—it’s time to stop rooting for failure
“Obamacare” is much in the headlines right now and not for the right reasons. Having been the bargaining chip of choice for Republicans during this month’s shutdown, the “health exchanges,” through which patients can purchase insurance, are suffering some fairly major glitches. The consequence is that it is now open season on the Affordable Care […]
Leana Wen: Announcing the total transparency manifesto
Our healthcare system is broken and in dire need of reform. We all know the statistics: the US spends $2.7 trillion on healthcare, 30% of which is waste in the form of unnecessary tests and unnecessary treatments. Conflicts of interest are rampant, with 94% of doctors reporting an affiliation with a pharmaceutical or device manufacturing […]
Richard Smith on John Munro: odd shoes and charisma
How when you are a 20 year old medical student with almost no clinical experience and no experience at all of death do you talk to a dying patient? What do you say? Do you avoid the topic of death altogether or do you put it top of the agenda? Should you look sad? Can […]