Improving patient safety through behavioral change is something that all healthcare providers strive to achieve. Supported by a three year grant, we are involved in a new way of doing this by using motivational interviewing (MI) among staff to improve patient outcomes. A technique typically used by clinicians for patients, MI aims to empower and […]
John J Park and Rifat Atun: Will global health be Trumped?
Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States (US) has left many in the global health community startled. What lies ahead for the future of global health and sustainable development, especially for millions of vulnerable people largely dependent on US assistance for health? When Donald Trump famously announced: “I am not running to […]
Lorraine Atkinson: Preventing prison suicides
2016 will be remembered for many reasons. I will remember it as the worst year on record for the number of prisoners who have taken their own lives in prisons in England and Wales. More than 100 people have died by suicide in prison since the beginning of 2016. There are five weeks remaining yet […]
Tiago Villanueva: Primary care in Brazil’s largest favela
Walking through Rio de Janeiro’s largest slum, Favela da Rocinha, in the pouring rain is probably not the wisest thing for a foreign visitor to do. But on a recent trip to Rio, I was determined not to squander the one chance I had to visit the Maria do Socorro Silva e Souza Family Health Clinic—one of […]
Harry HX Wang and Sian M Griffiths: A primary care oriented approach to pursue population health in China
From Healthy China 2020 to Healthy China 2030 Seven decades ago, China’s healthcare was characterised by barefoot doctors who demonstrated the contribution of primary care to improved population health. Subsequent reform, however, restructured the healthcare delivery model to focus on providing curative care in a market driven system as opposed to spending on preventive care. […]
Delan Devakumar et al: Politicians need to first do no harm
It’s been a monumental year. The UK’s decision to leave the European Union and the Chilcot report on the Iraq war prompt us to wonder why these self-inflicted problems ever happened. The legacies of David Cameron and Tony Blair will be dominated by Brexit and Iraq respectively. Different in many ways, but each was a […]
Aser García Rada: Living in limbo in Greece’s refugee camps
From late March to late August I worked in two Greek camps for refugees as part of a joint Spanish-French Red Cross deployment to support the Hellenic Red Cross. Providing care to people, many of whom were originally middle class, in the developed but wobbling Greece carried with it certain peculiarities. I began and finished in Ritsona, […]
Valentina Lichtner: Incorrect patient record selection
Recently the Wall Street Journal alerted its readers to a report by the ECRI Institute in the US on the common problem of patient misidentification. [1,2] The study found 7613 “wrong patient” incidents reported across 181 organizations in the period January 2013 to July 2015. Selecting the wrong electronic record was one example of this type of incident. […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—28 November 2016
NEJM 24 Nov 2016 Vol 375 AAA in UK & USA It grieves me to say it, but there are certain things that American medicine does better than British medicine. Repairing abdominal aortic aneurysms seems to be one of them. It’s not that men on the whole live longer over there, but only a third […]
Chris Simms: Path dependency—Trump, Brexit, and the future Europe
Barbara Tuchman begins her seminal work The March of Folly by observing that a “phenomenon noticeable through history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.” The phenomenon seems relevant to the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and perhaps to upcoming European national elections that […]