Doctors took a long time to recognise that people die. We are no longer afraid to talk about “end of life care.” And, a large number turned up to an 8am fringe meeting run by the RCGP Scotland end of life care subgroup at the RCGP-SAPC Primary Care conference. Lots of ideas are introduced with […]
Sharon L Camp: It is time for a public health approach to abortion
The global maternal mortality has dropped dramatically during the last decade. This is good news. Sadly, however, too many women continue to die from pregnancy related causes. In part, this is because unsafe abortion—one of the leading preventable causes of maternal death—is a public health crisis that is going largely ignored. Every year, 47 000 […]
Richard Smith: A successful and cheerful whistleblower
Peter Wilmshurst is that rare thing—a successful whistleblower. What’s more, he’s a cheerful one, despite having lost £25 000, faced bankruptcy and the loss of his house, and spent every evening, weekend, and his annual leave for three years successfully defending an egregious libel case. Most readers of the BMJ must be familiar with the […]
Caroline Robinson: Curing TB in Europe is more about politics than science
Despite being considered as a disease of the past, tuberculosis (TB) kills seven people in Europe every hour and, worryingly, rates of multi drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) in the region are the highest in the world. With 81,000 MDR-TB cases in 2010 alone, the European region accounts for nearly 20 % of the global burden. […]
Elizabeth Loder: Liberating clinical trial data
Unexpectedly, it seemed I was preaching mostly to the converted when I spoke at the recent US Institute of Medicine Workshop on Sharing Clinical Trial Data. I was given the job of the opening “inspirational” talk which was to emphasise the benefits of sharing data from clinical trials. The meeting planners anticipated that later speakers […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Susan Greenfield forecasts the future at the RCGP-SAPC conference
Forecasting the future is a tricky task. It’s not brain surgery—just more difficult. Baroness Susan Greenfield, brain physiologist, writer, and broadcaster shared her four challenges for the future in the context of science and humanity at the RCGP-SAPC Annual Primary Care conference. 1) Nanotechnology. Describing how nanotechnology might change the world would be like trying […]
Kieran Walsh: Can we make savings in medical education?
The age of austerity in the NHS has only just begun. The next few years will likely bring closed Casualty departments, downgraded district hospitals, longer waiting times, and rationed treatments. As Whitehall casts around for more targets for efficiency savings, will it look at the £5 billion spent each year on healthcare professionals’ education? Will […]
Muir Gray: How to design and plan population based systems
I will present the approach we use in designing and planning population based systems of care in ten short blogs. Here are the ten steps: Define the scope of the system. Define the population to be served. Reach agreement on the aim and objectives of the service. For each objective find one or […]
Marge Berer: Jeremy Hunt supports 12 week limit for abortion
At the Labour conference last week, Andy Burnham accused Jeremy Hunt of failing to make any statements about important current health service issues in parliament since he became health secretary. What a pity he decided to speak up last week, because now we know just how uninformed he is. Hunt said he favoured reducing the […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—8 October 2012
JAMA 3 Oct 2012 Vol 308 1333 Can vitamin D prevent the common cold? The answer is almost certainly yes, depending on baseline levels. If you run a trial in a place where the sun shines, good dairy products are abundant, and the ocean teems with oily fish, you might get a negative result. Such […]