Buried in last week’s legislation to bail out Wall Street was a small but important victory for healthcare in America. At the same time as passing a $700 billion rescue package for the financial sector last Friday, the US House of Representatives also passed a bill on mental health parity. Rumour has it that parity was added to the bail-out bill as a sweetener for reluctant House members. more…

The bad press heaped on pharmacists this week no doubt raised a few smiles among BMJ readers. But doctors should remember that pharmacists are easy targets for consumer watchdog Which?, whose survey found that more than a third of pharmacies give unsatisfactory advice. more…

South Africa’s newly elected president, Mr Kgalemo Mothlante, acted swiftly to end an era of ugly controversy and extreme incompetence in the health ministry by appointing a highly regarded, new health minister and effectively demoting the previous one, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who implemented all of former president Thabo Mbeki’s eccentric AIDS beliefs, which has laid the foundations for the increased burden of disease that South Africa now has. more…

Recently I met a student who had been in a Problem Based Learning (PBL) group that I had ‘facilitated’ in 2006. During the PBL we will have spent around six hours together each week for a full trimester (so around 72 hours contact time in all) and I was interested to know if he could remember learning anything specific from his time in the group. Not surprisingly he could not recollect any specific facts but there was a much broader issue, that of tackling conflicting advice, which did come to mind. more…

It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist impulse in the visual arts. It sounds plausible: the documentary impulse, the desire faithfully to record what is actually there, which has always been close to the heart of realism, is just so much more efficiently done by photography. Darkroom trickery excepted, a photograph feels like evidence, something taken from the scene. A drawing or painting, however gifted the artist, puts the human being in the way, with all of a human being’s fallibility. more…

After years of blogging in the cyber-wilderness, the BMJ has welcomed me into its warm embrace by giving me a little blogging corner all of my own. From this virtual soapbox I’m hoping to chart my efforts to navigate the murky waters of GP training as I kick off a year-long stint as a GP registrar in inner-city London. more…

Yesterday, the Tax Policy Center released its initial analysis of the health reform plans of the two presidential campaigns. The center is a joint initiative of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two leading Washington think tanks. more…

We have no right to steal from future generations. At the end of this month, the consultation will close on the proposed carbon reduction strategy for the NHS in England. This country is the first in the world to start legislating on climate change, the most serious and urgent health threat to current and future generations. Doctors, scientists, and other health professionals have a special responsibility to urge our colleagues, communities, policy makers, and politicians to take this threat seriously now by concerted action. more…

Are we making good progress with improving health care? If not, why not and how could we do better?

I tried to answer these questions as I spoke to a thousand enthusiasts for health care quality in Nijmegen at the launch of IQ Scientific Institute for Quality of Healthcare. There were probably 50 people in the room better qualified than me to answer the questions, but it’s the Promethean fate of ex-editors and roving pundits like me to sound off to people who know more than we do. The solution is to get out as fast as you can.

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News of the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to smash its first atoms on 10 September, makes me wonder not about subatomic particles but about adjectives. When I teach researchers how to report their work, I generally advise them to be wary of qualifying adjectives as they seem out of place in scientific papers. more…