The NHS should, as its name suggests, be a service which caters to the health of the nation. Britain, as a nation, has a rich and deeply international history. With the benefits of internationalism have come complexities of addressing the needs of a multicultural population. To achieve this not only does it need to attend to […]
Cheryl Rofer: Reading Fukushima status reports
Now that things are happening less rapidly at Fukushima, I’ve been looking less frequently at the status reports. It became obvious early on that the general aftermath of the earthquake, the loss of electrical power and communication, and other factors were leading to erroneous reports and too much instant interpretation. Taking some time helps to […]
Rebecca Welfare on World TB Day: dilemmas in tuberculosis treatment
The weekly multidisciplinary committee on drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) had assembled to discuss the case of a young man who had started treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) 12 months previously. […]
Richard Smith: Working towards universal health coverage
Some one billion people have no access to health care, while each year 150 million experience financial catastrophe and 100 million are pushed into poverty because of having to pay for health care. Those are some of the reasons why the world needs universal health coverage, said David Evans from WHO at the 13th Annual […]
Cheryl Rofer on the nuclear reactors damaged in the Japanese earthquake
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has six reactors. It is located on Japan’s northeast coast, close to the earthquake’s epicenter. A tsunami higher than any anticipated took the plant’s generators out of service. In a nuclear power plant, the core, where the nuclear reactions take place, generates heat, which boils water and further heats […]
Andrew Burd and professionalism
In a previous posting I talked about professionalism in the context of interprofessional respect and relationships. Like many terms once you start to move away from your own concepts you find that there has been considerable discussion and debate about definitions in the past. […]
Sandra Lako: World Water Day in Freetown
On my way to Spur Road this morning I walked past a group of children scooping murky water out of the gutter into some buckets. These buckets were then lifted to their heads and carried home. Further down the road there was another group of people, huddled around a standpipe. 45 yellow five-gallon containers were […]
Liz Wager: Journals that dare not speak their name
There’s a new species of journal lurking in the medical publishing jungle, but it doesn’t seem to have a name. As a zoologist turned writer (ie somebody obsessed by taxonomy and words) this bothers me so I hope somebody will christen them soon. To launch this campaign, I’ll begin by describing what the new type […]
Muir Gray: Bye Bye Quality 2.0
I received some criticism for the blog Bye Bye Quality (Hello Value), as a record company might have labelled it, but most reaction was positive. Where it was not this indicated that I had not made clear enough the fact that quality improvement – doing things better – does add value, but the issue is […]
Kailash Chand on the BMA’s opposition to NHS reforms
BMA members rather than the organisation itself called a special representative meeting (SRM) on the 15th March 2011, the second in two decades. Dr Hamish Meldrum, the chair of the BMA council, appeared visibly anxious and keen to maintain the unity of the profession. In a professionally delivered speech he struck exactly the right balance […]