JAMA 25 July 2012 Vol 308 This was the week of the XIX International AIDS Conference held in Washington DC, where the catchphrase everywhere was “an AIDS-free generation.” That forms the title of the first piece in this week’s JAMA, which is given over entirely to HIV-related matters. So also is a large part of […]
How many of us feel the culture in the NHS brings out the best in us? Judging from the majority of staff surveys, not many. I happen to think this matters enormously. Staff really are the greatest asset to any organisation, especially an organisation where caring is a fundamental part of the task. Creating the […]
Fiona Pathiraja’s blog “Who are chaperones really for?” set me thinking about my own practice and how nurses react to similar circumstances. I am a general medical nurse with 35 years of experience. Intimate care of both men and women is central to a nurse’s daily work. We need to carry out personal care in […]
Patient health, patient experience, and health outcomes for individuals and populations should always be at the heart of the NHS. But the best way to actually achieve this most effectively might be to address it more obliquely. […]
A recent Cochrane systematic review caught my eye, not so much for its conclusions but for what it shows about the state of the medical literature. According to Paul Garner, one of the review’s authors, they found a study on nearly 28,000 children, which was published in the BMJ in 2006, which concluded that deworming […]
Proponents of integrated care in England sometimes look to Scotland as an example to be emulated. Yet, while the Scottish NHS has a much simpler structure that ought to facilitate integrated care, the reality is rather different. A report by the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission published in 2011 found that community […]
Am I the only member of the ePortfolio fan club? If the recent vitriol on Twitter is anything to go by, one would be forgiven for thinking that the fan club comprises n=1. The most notable tweet about ePortfolio was from an anaesthetic trainee who said, “The portfolio is the medical profession’s equivalent of Mao’s […]
Over the next few weeks more than 14 000 athletes from 205 Olympic teams and 170 paralympic teams, and 4 million spectators are expected to attend the London 2012 Olympic Games. For the athletes the British Olympic committee has advised against too much hand-shaking in case they pick up some performance damaging infectious disease. The […]
Roger Maltby’s book Notable Names in Anaesthesia contains fascinating biographies of some of the great and the good whose names are familiar to anaesthetists everywhere, such as Magill and Macintosh. Since it was written, a new category of notable names has appeared: those anaesthetists who are famous for the wrong reasons. I’d like to suggest […]
It’s been a bad week. I’ve flown 6000 miles to attend two meetings where not only did I not manage to say anything useful but I also came across as stupid. Such experiences always lead me to reflect on my extreme deficiencies and marvel that I’ve got as far as I have. I’m writing this […]