When I visited the clinical ethics department at Washington Hospital Center some years back, I was impressed by how acute ethical dilemmas, once resolved, led to presentations in the affected department to reflect on the problem and find ways to minimise its recurrence. These ways included imparting factual knowledge, whether medical, ethical, or legal, or […]
We need to find a way to deal with the touch-point between professional judgement and consumer sovereignty […]
An evaluation of the UK’s pathology capacity by Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has identified that over the next 5-10 years “there is likely to be a severe crisis.” The report highlights a 4.5% year-on-year increase in the number and complexity of histopathology requests since 2007/08; the majority of which are for the investigation of cancer. […]
As the reverberations of the recent scandal regarding sexual exploitation in the aid sector continue to ricochet around the world, hogging headlines, and eliciting the inevitable (belated) response of “never again,” millions of desperately in need people in unimaginably appalling situations continue to suffer—unheard, unseen, and largely forgotten. The antithesis of humanitarianism, the idea of […]
Over the course of a day, a gynaecologist will care for patients with a wide range of presentations—from a premature baby who doesn’t survive beyond the first nights whose young mother has had previous treatment for precursors of cervical cancer, to the stress of another woman in a colposcopy clinic worried about the management of […]
An excellent patient-doctor relationship is capable of doing much good, even when medicine no longer can […]
Think for a moment about all the scientific articles you’ve peer reviewed throughout your career. Do you ever find it challenging to make time to perform the review? Do you worry about your reviews being too picky or lenient? Have authors brushed over your comments without really tackling them? Do you ever wonder why you […]
The Royal College of Psychiatrists and the media routinely state that there is an “epidemic” of mental disorder—1 in 4 people in the UK, with 3 in 4 said not to get the treatment they need. These disease-mongering assertions have been recycled for so long that they have become unexamined societal truisms. We are apparently […]
It is comparatively easy to find funding for the randomised trials that may or may not show the effectiveness of innovations, but much harder to fund scale-up […]
Matt Morgan and Peter Brindley have been studying human doctors in their native conference environment […]