Medical education has long seen the need for reform. The aged style of listening to a lecturer impart hours worth of highly technical scientific information at a rate which sees […]
Month: September 2013
Unni Karunakara: Médecins Sans Frontières’s decision to pull out of Somalia
Médecins Sans Frontières’s announcement on 14 August that we were closing all our medical programmes in Somalia sent shockwaves through political and humanitarian communities. It came at a time when world […]
Hazim Sadideen: Are surgical experts born or made?
There have been increasing levels of research around the concept of surgical expertise and its development. It’s an intriguing debate, a greater understanding of which will help to drive professional […]
Richard Smith: Medical journals: “a colossal problem of quality”
We knew that we had “a colossal problem of quality” when we began the peer review congresses in 1989, said Drummond Rennie, creator of the congresses, at the seventh congress […]
Tiago Villanueva: How can doctors avoid becoming deskilled whilst working in non-clinical roles?
My main concern about working in a fulltime non-clinical position is becoming a less competent doctor by the time I start to see patients again (whenever and wherever that is). […]
Vasiliy Vlassov: The Russian government tries to reduce hospitalisation rates
It is well known that the USSR and modern Russia have a significantly higher number of hospital beds compared to other European countries (1 225 370 hospital beds: 143 347 […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Life without health insurance in the US
If you are a UK citizen, you probably think we are barbarians. Go ahead and say it, “How can you be a wealthy nation spending so much on healthcare and […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—23 September 2013
NEJM 19 Sep 2013 Vol 369 1106 I’m starting with the second paper about colonic cancer screening in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, because it takes us to […]
Jen Gunter: The challenge of taking the stairs
New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, wants people to take the stairs. He is quoted as saying, “Buildings are often designed in ways that minimize physical activity,” and as inactivity is […]
Martin McKee: What on earth were the LibDems thinking? The tobacco industry and the party conference
Once, in a very different time long ago, no one would have seen anything wrong. An organisation purporting to represent Britain’s small shopkeepers set up stall at a party political […]