England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has just announced that from April this year, overseas patients will be charged upfront for non-urgent NHS care. Whenever a new government NHS policy hits the headlines, the next task is to discover the story that they wanted to bury. I have previously written about health tourism and asking patients […]
Since its inception, nearly every member of the Republican Party has run vowing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Ashish Jha looks at what might happen next. […]
NEJM 2 Feb 2017 Vol 376 Adding bicalutamide to RT for recurrent prostate cancer So far, this year is proving a good one for urology studies. Here are the follow-up results of a trial which was designed in the 1990s to compare two treatments for locally recurrent prostate cancer following radical prostatectomy. The signal to […]
A week ago, the news was awash with shock, dismay, and outrage over President Trump’s executive order of 27 January, which temporarily suspended the United States’s refugee program and indefinitely barred the admittance of refugees from Syria. While it has been heartening to read reports of protests, and to see the number of professional and […]
I have previously written about cadmium and lithium, two of three elements that were discovered in 1817. The third, selenium, was discovered by Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848), who is also credited with having discovered cerium, silicon, and thorium. Berzelius wrote that the similarity of its properties to those of tellurium had induced him to call […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. When I first visited Dumfries in 1980, the new hospital was only five years old. I enthused over it, but now […]
Doctors have to make difficult clinical judgements about their patients on a daily basis and are trained to do so. This decision making develops with experience and the profession balances risk versus benefit on a case by case basis. Decision making, however, has changed rapidly over the last year with the added pressures brought on by the […]
One explanation that has been offered for the UK’s self-destructive decision to leave the European Union is that there are now few people left alive who can remember the ruined Europe after the Second World War. Last year saw the 60th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, but it seems that the great smogs and […]
During the past year we have become increasingly aware of the pressures facing frontline clinicians working in acute hospitals. Each of us spent time in 2016 shadowing a general physician on their ward round to gain an understanding of work at the sharp end of acute medicine in an NHS trust rated as “outstanding” by […]
The long awaited Brexit White Paper has finally appeared. Yet Martin McKee finds it fails to shed any light on how Brexit’s consequences for health (or much else) will be addressed. […]