Achieving universal health coverage in India: Inefficiency is the problem, not money

India is a land of contrasts and its provision of healthcare is no different. While wealthier people living in urban areas have access to high quality healthcare services, a vast majority of people living in rural areas have very limited access to quality healthcare. India has been widely criticised for having one of the world’s […]

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Maria Hägglund: Electronic health records in Sweden—how can we go from transparency to collaboration?

I have had full access to my electronic health record (EHR) online since 2012, when Uppsala became the first region in Sweden to make EHR accessible to patients. I remember the excitement I felt the first time I logged in, and I’ve continued to use the patient accessible EHR (PAEHR) referred to as “Journalen” ever […]

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Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The Two Cultures—Leavis versus Snow

Last week I showed how the noun “culture” developed from the IndoEuropean root KWEL, which implied turning in different ways. “Culture” entered English in the 15th century with meanings related to tilling the soil, both on its own and as a suffix in “agriculture”; “horticulture” followed in the late 17th century, but it was not […]

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Richard Smith: Has my mother been given “the gift of forgetting?”

This morning I read the line “The gift of forgetting” in a poem by Wisława Szymborska. Immediately I asked myself if it is a gift to forget, and quickly—and somewhat counterintuitively—decided it was. Something else that I’d read this morning in a book by a neurosurgeon supported the conclusion. Henry Marsh in his uncomfortably honest […]

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Mary Higgins: Maslow and maternity care—how to reconcile experiences that are poles apart?

One of my medical students has a fantastic story to explain why she wants to specialise in obstetrics and gynaecology. As a pre-clinical medical student, before she had ever stepped into a maternity ward in Ireland, she went to work in a developing country. This student quietly watched and helped where she could. She saw […]

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