Last week I found myself at a conference on multidisciplinary teamwork in the NHS, and one of the keynote speakers observed that the main benefit of the “credit crunch” is that bankers have overtaken healthcare professionals as the most hated profession in the country. The media is full of stories of doom, as the banking […]
Ohad Oren: Ambulances flying above the Middle East
“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction” William Osler (1849-1919) Dominique Jean Larrey was strongly affected by the misfortunes of others. He would often […]
Lucy Dennison on changing her surname
I seem to be at an age when every summer weekend involves a wedding. When it came to my own wedding this summer I had to face the dilemma of whether or not to change my surname. This has been a fairly hot topic amongst my friends, many of whom are doctors, and seems to […]
Richard Smith: A ripping yarn of editorial misconduct
In what has been called the age of accountability, editors have continued to be as unaccountable as kings. But stories of editorial misconduct are growing, and another story, nothing less than a ripping yarn, has recently appeared in the Harvard Health Policy Review (2008; 9: 46-55.) The story is told by Donald Light and Rebecca […]
Julian Sheather on top-up payments
Every so often a story comes along that unexpectedly sheds light on a far more widely shared unease. Top-up payments is one of those stories. For many years we have lived, more or less happily, with a simultaneous headline commitment to an NHS that is free to all on the basis of need, an implicit […]
William Lee on Philip Nitschke
Dr Philip Nitschke, director of the Australian pro-euthanasia group EXIT International, has come to the UK to promote the launch of his ebook ‘The Peaceful Pill Handbook’ – a controversial guide to methods of suicide. The paper version has been banned in Australia and published in New Zealand with some pages blacked out. […]
Rob Siebers: Inadvertent duplicate publication
Duplicate or highly similar publications are unethical and unacceptable in the biomedical literature. Déjà Vu, a freely accessible database of highly similar and duplicate publications, is a valuable tool for journal editorial staff to identify whether a submitted article has previously been published and has the potential to be a powerful deterrent to this behaviour. […]
Anna Donald on colonialism and skin tone
A blog, at last. I apologise to kind readers who have been wondering where I’ve got to. We went on holiday for a week – seven days in the equatorial sun in the far north of Australia. It was heavenly. The sea was green and 23-25 degrees centigrade (for US readers who might think we […]
Liz Wager: Was it worth missing a bus for?
Yesterday, I received some great feedback about a workshop I ran. Sorry if this sounds horribly self-congratulatory, but I’d like to share it with you. At the start of the workshop, one participant politely explained that she couldn’t stay for the whole session as she had a plane to catch. This struck me as a […]
Tauseef Mehrali on the universal strategy
With the month of fasting behind me and afternoon blood sugar levels now soaring above 3mmol/l, I’m really quite getting into the swing of general practice. It’s the Russian roulette of the medical world. Your fate is simultaneously within and way beyond your control. After all, it was you that called that patient in during […]