Richard Price and co-workers published a network meta analysis evaluating the effect on mortality of selective digestive decontamination (SDD), selective oropharyngeal decontamination (SOD), and topical oropharyngeal chlorhexidine in patients in […]
Year: 2014
Ryan Irwin: What healthcare can learn from football—10 key lessons
Football, the world’s most played sport, provides an excellent laboratory for understanding the nature of organisations and has some useful lessons for members of the healthcare economy. Here, 10 lessons […]
Sarah Gregory: What can we learn from how other countries fund health and social care?
England is not alone in facing the implications of an ageing population with changing patterns of illness. To inform the work of the independent commission on the future of health […]
The BMJ Today: Debates about alternative medicine and cancer screening
People love complementary and alternative therapies, and vote with their wallets to spend close to £5 billion a year in the UK alone on treatments such as massage, relaxation, evening […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—31 March 2014
NEJM 27 Mar 2014 Vol 370 1189 I sing the body mitotic: we are a mass of cells dividing, mutating, cannibalizing, spreading. The wonder is not that we ever die […]
James Raftery: Should the NHS use the new meningitis B vaccine?
The argument over whether the NHS should fund Bexsero, the new meningitis B vaccine from Novartis, raises a global issue about the price of the new vaccine, as well as […]
David Wrigley: Standing up against the fragmentation of the English NHS
On a little known website an advert popped up recently that didn’t catch the eye of many people. Those that did see it realised the implications of it when they […]
The BMJ Today: Einstein’s theory of data, climate change and the “threat to human survival,” and New York facing legal challenge over e-cigs ban
“Information is not knowledge,” was Einstein’s cautionary take on the power (and limitation) of data. In healthcare, the collection of patient feedback and other data is regularly hailed as the […]
Veena Rao: Wanted in India—a national programme to address malnutrition
There has been an unexpected and welcome development in the public discourse on India’s malnutrition. For the first time, the subject is a talking point in the pre-election political debates, […]
The BMJ Today: Farewell to traditional public health services and to our GP columnist
There’s a new vocabulary being used to describe the NHS in England that conjures up images of the American Frontier; of battles over territories, conquests, and survival. GP and former […]