When it all goes wrong, that’s when you are really tested. Quantas pilot Captain David Evans described what happened when an engine disintegrated in mid air on Flight QF32 and three large metal shards pierced various parts of the huge A380 aircraft causing major systems failure. Only one of four engines could operate at normal […]
Luisa Dillner: Identity and humanity at TEDMED, day 3
It’s at the end of a long TEDMED day that Andrew Solomon comes onto the stage. He looks a bit shiny, with a smart blue suit (did no one tell him the dress code is resort casual?) and a high forehead. He turns out to be single handedly worth the price of admission to this […]
Domhnall MacAuley: International Quality Forum, day 2
“Stroke care was woeful,” said Dame Ruth Carnall, former chief executive of NHS London, in her sobering account of efforts to change the system. Less than 1% of patients had thrombolysis, less than 50% were treated in specialist stroke units, and standards were low across a whole range of indicators. Poor care, low standards, and […]
David Lock: Should the NHS fund assisted conception for lesbian couples?
Amongst the issues in the in-tray of CCGs, the issue of funding for assisted conception (typically either intrauterine insemination or IVF) for lesbian couples is not highest on the agenda, but it is an interesting and difficult problem, and different PCTs came up with different solutions. The problem is easy to state, but is a […]
Luisa Dillner: TEDMED, day 2
The best thing about TEDMED is its delegates. Firstly they genuinely want to talk to you. Secondly they are all really interesting. Everyone has either worked for NASA or is at the very least a CEO of an entrepreneurial healthcare company. The man I sit next to at one session is a neurologist who has […]
Readers’ editor: Video abstracts
Cuba’s population witnessed huge economic change after losing the former Soviet Union as a trading partner in 1989. Food shortages caused by the downturn led to obesity rates falling from 12% to 7% in six years, an average weight loss of between 4-5kg across the whole population. The country also introduced new green policies, including […]
Domhnall MacAuley: International Quality Forum, day 1
On welcoming 3300 delegates from 80 countries to the International Quality Forum in London, home of the BMJ, Fiona Godlee (editor in chief, BMJ) asked us to remember the recent marathon trauma at the home of Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Boston. All the more poignant as we congregated at Excel, the registration centre […]
Luisa Dillner on TEDMED
I want the world to be a better, healthier place. Really I do. And now, at my first TEDMED conference in Washington DC, I have high hopes of hearing from people already working on that. TEDMED runs a fairly linear conference structure—big auditorium, big thinkers on the stage, for short, pack a punch presentations. At […]
Richard Smith: Two deaths
A woman I hardly know and I are sat in a café in a country far from Britain, and the conversation turns to death. She tells me of two deaths in her family in the NHS. The first is remarkable. An elderly woman, my companion’s mother, is waiting in a hospital for news of her […]
Pritpal S Tamber: And so, it’s time for TEDMED
Regular readers of my blog will know that this week is TEDMED, the US based event that looks—with a multidisciplinary lens—at the future of health and medicine. I’m TEDMED’s clinical editor, one of the four person core editorial team that recommends topics and speakers to the curator, the ever curious Jay Walker. I thought I’d […]