We live in our own little boxes. Maureen Bisognano from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement , in her keynote address, told us we need to get out of our own little boxes if we are to improve healthcare. Quality improvement means breaking out of silos. She told us we needed to focus more on our […]
Desmond O’Neill: The ethics of advocacy
The infant’s eyes are huge, the profile of its tiny cheek bisected by a naso-gastric tube and its ugly adhesive patch. Peering from the corner of the billboard, the image aches with vulnerability and fear, a message reinforced by the slogan—Sick Children Are Out Of Time. Arising from a recent major publicity campaign by a […]
Justine Bharamato: Sudden cardiac death in athletes
Fabrice Muamba was discharged from hospital yesterday, after he collapsed during a football match due to a cardiac arrest on 17 March. His collapse reminds us of the sensational nature of sudden unexpected death in a young person, not least an elite athlete. Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is estimated to be responsible for 60 000 […]
Vinice Thomas: The push for improvement in maternity care
Substandard care within maternity services remains a high profile issue. It seems that every month there is news coverage about failing hospitals, avoidable maternal deaths, and below optimum care provided to mothers. Last month the Care Quality Commission (CQC) issued a formal warning to a hospital outside Greater London following three visits in February 2012. […]
Richard Smith: Managing infertility in Kenya
Ivan Illich, the great critic of modern medicine, argued that it had displaced well the traditional cultural mechanisms for managing pain, sickness, and death with a false promise of eliminating all three. This is an abstract idea, but at a party in Cape Town last night I encountered an easily understood example. My Kenyan friends […]
Vasiliy Vlassov: Tolerance
It took time to think about what happened which is why I am writing about this event a while after it occurred. The shock was hard, and I felt I needed to speak with my friends, in the hope of understanding it. If you watch what is going in Russia you know that Russia is […]
Deborah Cohen on the attempts to track down unpublished oseltamivir trial data
“The same standard of openness should apply to all (drug) trial data, whether sponsored by industry, investigator-initiated, or sponsored by public grant-giving bodies.” That’s the view of representatives from the European Medicines Agency and the regulatory bodies from France, the UK, and the Netherlands writing in PLoS Medicine. Their statement comes as accompaniment to an […]
Veena S Rao: India’s 2012 budget-a paradigm shift in addressing India’s undernutrition
The Indian finance minister’s 2012 budget speech marks a significant moment for the much awaited, much required, paradigm shift in the government’s approach to reduce undernutrition and micronutrient deficiency, the indicators of which are fast qualifying India as the malnutrition capital of the world (despite 8% economic growth). It is now clear that high growth […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 16 April 2012
JAMA 11 April 2012 Vol 307 1489 The new editor of JAMA feels that his worthy journal needs a bit of livening up, and who can disagree? He has borrowed an old idea from the BMJ, in the form of head-on for and against articles. “Should a 55-year-old man who is otherwise well, with systolic […]
Tiago Villanueva: An overview of medical employment in Europe
Does the name Grzegorz Chodkowski ring a bell with you? It didn’t with me until recently. Chodkowski is a Polish doctor who has worked in the UK, and who created an organisation called Medpharm Careers, which claims to be “Europe’s largest international medical jobs fair.” He and his staff came to Lisbon on 31 March, […]