We don’t celebrate success enough in medicine. We sometimes mutter, grumble, and gripe, but we seldom congratulate our friends and colleagues on their success. What a pleasure therefore to attend the Welsh Clinical Teacher of the Year Awards in the beautiful Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. A gala evening of recognition for those […]
Chris Ham: Medical leadership must move from the margins to the mainstream
A new report from the health services management centre at the University of Birmingham and The King’s Fund, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, provides a comprehensive and up to date picture of the state of medical leadership in NHS trusts today. Thirty years after the Griffiths report set out a vision of […]
Richard Smith: Stop jumping from “is” to “ought”
Last week for the first time I examined a PhD, and one of my co-examiners, a moral philosopher, told us of “Hume’s guillotine” and taught us a lesson that all doctors should know. The defence of the PhD was in Copenhagen and in public, as is the custom in Denmark. Around 80 people were there, […]
Desmond O’Neill: Gerontolysis
In an era when didactic teaching in medical education is frowned upon and where workshops and problem based learning rule supreme, it is refreshing to be reminded of the powerful impact of a high quality lecture. A superb overview of how good lectures tap into expectation, ritual and theatre posits that lectures are particularly effective […]
Mary Madden: Should we assume medical devices work until proven otherwise?
Low standards of evidence for medical device regulation in Europe have led to clinical concerns about the potential dangers posed by the highest risk (class III) devices, especially implantable devices [1, 2]. In the wake of hip and breast implant scandals [3, 4] and in the midst of growing concerns about the widespread acceptance of […]
Julian Sheather: Francis—the ethical challenge
Medical ethics has positioned itself as a decision making tool, a philosophical spanner if you like in the clinician’s toolbox. For understandable reasons it has concentrated on practical dilemmas: even those landmark legal decisions—the removal of treatment from Anthony Bland comes to mind—are buttressed by intense philosophical scrutiny. In the process medical ethics has attracted […]
Readers’ editor: Crazy eggs and the BMJ in a mobile world
Each year the BMJ runs an online reader survey. The survey is mainly multiple choice but there is also a free text question where we ask readers: “What single improvement to bmj.com would make the most difference to you?” Every year the most popular response is “Make it free.” There are other recurring responses to […]
Krishna Chinthapalli on Atul Gawande—thinker, leader, doctor, writer
In 2009, Obama convened senior politicians in the Oval Office to discuss one magazine article: why were there Medicare costs of $15,000 per person per year in the Texan town of McAllen, when a neighbouring town had costs of $7,500 per person per year? Especially when the hospitals in McAllen were performing worse than its […]
David Lock: Spot the legal howlers—picking over the assurances given by Lord Howe to the House of Lords
Healthcare lawyers have a new game—it’s called “spot the errors.” A number of us have been through the speech made by Lord Howe in winding up the debate in the House of Lords on the new NHS procurement regulations, on Wednesday 24th April, in order to count the legal howlers. This was, after all, the […]
Richard Smith: A French recipe for happiness
Émilie du Châtelet, the French aristocrat, philosopher, lover of Voltaire, and interpreter of Newton, had highly original (and possibly even correct) ideas on the route to happiness. Those who are tired of the drab and soulless maxims of today’s self-help guides might like to try her more exciting advice. Something that conflicts immediately with today’s […]