Despite the AHCA failing, plans to defund Planned Parenthood in the US will damage women’s healthcare choices, says Reena Aggarwal […]
Reena Aggarwal: What does the failure of AHCA mean for women’s healthcare?
Richard Smith: Quality in the NHS in 2017
Britons invented the first antibiotic, the MRI scanner, in vitro fertilisation, and much more, and Britain punches way above its weight in science, said Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS England’s medical director, at the HCA Healthcare UK conference this week. It also has a “semi-integrated” health and social care system. Link it all together and, Keogh […]
Jane Morris: Do school children need happiness lessons?
When I’ve discharged patients, they’ve told me how “if only they taught DBT skills at school, I would never have needed to come into hospital.” We’re very proud of our dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) groups: they teach mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal skills. And now at last, we hear that the Department for Education […]
Nir Eyal: Risky yet socially important clinical trials—the case of HIV-cure related research
Many early-phase studies towards an HIV cure or controlled remission involve substantial risks for study participants, but a host of ethical solutions are conceivable. […]
Nick Hopkinson: What is breathing worth? The economic cost of lung disease
It is no secret that the UK healthcare system is under strain. The percentage of GDP spent on healthcare is projected to fall to 6.6% by 2020/21, back to the same levels as the 1990s. For comparison, the OECD average (excluding the US) is 9.1%. Reminiscent of the 1990s, waiting times are rising and the system […]
Jennifer Dixon: The NHS Five Year Forward View—the task now is delivery
As the good book notes “Without a vision the people perish.” While not on a biblical scale, the Five Year Forward View published in 2014 set out what was a broad road for the NHS in England. Last week saw the latest report on its progress. The Five Year Forward View pithily summarised a common view […]
Chris Moulton: The answer to the NHS’s never ending A+E problem is actually fairly simple
Everybody wants world peace; everybody wants an end to poverty. And we all want the NHS to have a safe, efficient and cost-effective emergency service. The trouble is that nobody agrees how to bring it about. In January, A&E’s in England hitting the four-hour performance target was just 85.1%—the lowest figure since monthly reporting began […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—3 April 2017
NEJM 30 Mar 2017 Vol 376 Rivaroxaban vs aspirin long after VTE The longer you give anticoagulants to people following venous thromboembolism, the fewer subsequent thromboembolic events they will have. At some point you have to decide whether to go on or to stop, and this Bayer-funded trial has recruited participants who “had completed 6 to […]
Martin McKee: Article 50 has been triggered. Now what?
The sound of ideology slamming into a wall of reality is already echoing throughout Whitehall, says Martin McKee, as he unpicks some of the consequences of Brexit. […]
Kamal R Mahtani: Using systematic reviews to reduce research waste—who really cares?
The global spend on biomedical research and development is about $250 billion, so why is so much of it still wasted, asks Mahtani […]