Last week’s print BMJ included a 14 page supplement about BMJ Awards, held a week earlier in London. If you didn’t see it, here’s a link. The BMJ Awards website lists all the winners, along with pictures from the night. The BMJ Awards are now five years old. The event goes from strength to strength. Next […]
Richard Smith: Dragging global health from the 19th to the 21st century
Last week the World Health Assembly adopted some tough targets for NCD, including reducing deaths among those under 70 by 25% by 2025. The rhetoric is that a “whole of government, whole of society” approach will be needed, but in fact the agenda is dominated by health bodies. The Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network is […]
Peter Bailey: Galley slaves, rebel!
Jeremy Hunt’s speech to the King’s Fund on 23 May made me wonder if someone in the Department of Health had had an “Oh my God!” moment. A gut clenching, awful realisation that a catastrophic mistake has been made. A mistake that spells misery, shame, and horrible consequence. The sort of feeling you get when […]
Martin Roland: Reorganising GP care—back to the future
There seemed something familiar about the secretary of state’s announcements about general practice last week. Jeremy Hunt says that care is too often disjointed and he wants to give GPs responsibility for bringing it back together. I wonder how that could be done. Maybe community nurses could be practice based. Why not health visitors? Or […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—28 May 2013
JAMA 22 May 2013 Vol 309 2105 Viewpoints carry with them an offer of agreement or disagreement, and everything I write in these columns is based on that. I hope you sometimes click on the links, and I often wish you would disagree with me more. I hope the same goes for the authors of […]
Tara Lamont: Finding things to stop doing…the inverse evidence law?
Early exponents of evidence based medicine put forward an optimistic view of future healthcare, where the availability of robust information would allow clinicians to select the most effective treatments—and to stop doing things that were shown not to work. But this last part has proved elusive. A recent paper by Sarah Garner and colleagues from […]
David Lock: Do NHS commissioners invest enough in contract management?
The NHS is in the middle of the transition from a publicly funded and publicly provided health service towards a publicly funded but increasingly privately provided service. It is thus following the course adopted in social care, with the closure of local authority owned care homes and the contracting out of service provision to commercial, […]
Readers’ editor: Free pens and memory sticks
I spent yesterday at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, south London, talking to readers of the BMJ. The medical school library had organised an open day and a sales colleague had organised a BMJ stand, so I joined him to discuss our plans for the BMJ website with both qualified doctors and medical students. […]
Magdalena Kincaid: Basic surgical training on the Mount of Olives
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd) team has been here before, yet nothing from past experience can possibly prepare for being swept up by overwhelming excitement of entering the Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH) on the Mount of Olives, towering over East Jerusalem. AVH is our host again for the third Basic Surgical Skills […]
Tracey Koehlmoos on a national initiative for arts and health in the military
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend a national summit on arts, health, and wellbeing across the military on 10 April 2013. It was held at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) just outside of Washington, DC. I did not know a great deal about creative arts therapies prior to the event […]