Coinciding with the visit of the British prime minister, David Cameron, to India last week, a business seminar was held in Mumbai to identify opportunities for health sector partnerships. Meeta Lochan, secretary of the public health department of Maharashtra, offered insights on the intricacies of healthcare provisioning in Maharashtra. For instance, over the years the […]
Peter Bailey on the change of culture needed after the Francis report
How could they have behaved like that? It’s inhuman! Reading the Francis report, I was appalled and shamed by the neglect and lack of care to which patients in the Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust were subjected. Remembering though, that this was human behaviour, prompted me to wonder at the circumstances that are necessary for so […]
Desmond O’Neill: Ageing with Keith Jarrett
The last time I heard Keith Jarrett was just over thirty years ago, a distraction from the tensions of final med with some fellow medical students. Even the choir balcony tickets were eye wateringly expensive, the compact and elegant National Concert Hall in Dublin barely half full on a damp November night, and the experience […]
Richard Smith: Are Glaswegians the Aboriginals of Europe?
Harry Burns, the chief medical officer of Scotland and one of medicine’s philosophers, has spent a lot of time trying to understand why Scotland has such poor health and what might be done. He shared his thinking at a meeting in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary last week. Scotland has not always had poor health. For most […]
Daniel O’Brien: Buruli ulcer in a brave new world
My recent visit to the Buruli ulcer ward run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Akonolinga Hospital, Cameroon, was both inspiring and disturbing. The care provided was state of the art, but the visit led me to imagine an ideal world in which we could close these wards and change the face of this disease dramatically. […]
Pritpal S Tamber: The fallacy of user interfaces and big data
I’m lucky enough to spend my workdays around the kinetic kids in Google Campus, London. From what I can tell, they sit about hacking code to see what they might make possible. Occasionally they have flat whites, crack jokes, and look around them, but, in general, hacking is what they do. For reasons that are […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—25 February 2013
JAMA 20 Feb 2013 Vol 309 689 Long back in the last century, I was a hysterectomy robot. This was the lowest form of life in a London teaching hospital obstetrics and gynaecology department. I spent my days clerking patients and feeling gravid abdomens, and my nights (one in two) stitching episiotomies and writing out […]
Deborah Cohen: Update on antibiotic susceptibility test discs investigation
Last week a BMJ investigation reported that one of the world’s leading producers of diagnostic tests has been falsely marketing one of their products. Oxoid, owned by US diagnostics giant Thermo Fisher, has been selling antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST) discs that do not always contain the advertised amount of antibiotic. The $10bn a year company’s […]
Krishnan Ganapathy: Homo mobilicus – the homo sapiens of tomorrow
When Marty Cooper (whom I had the privilege of meeting) invented the cell phone in 1973, he could not have foreseen that he would be disproving Charles Darwin’s hypothesis. According to Darwin, from the days of the Big Bang it has taken tens of thousands of years, for a new species to evolve. Marty reduced […]
Richard Smith: Will entrepreneurs save the NHS?
All the political parties and those at the top of the NHS see an important role for entrepreneurs in the latest version of the health service. Those labouring within the service are less convinced, and entrepreneurs have great difficulty finding any customers. The NHS Commissioning Board (or CB, as we are learning to call it) […]