• Should all NHS premises provide free access to wi-fi? Yes, argues Victoria Betton in a head to head article published today. Betton, mHabitat programme director at Leeds and York Partnership […]
Month: August 2015
Neal Maskrey: What will replace QOF?
The 2004 UK GP contract contained the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), the boldest pay for performance scheme in healthcare ever attempted anywhere in the world. Eleven years on and […]
The BMJ Today: Urgent help for war torn Yemen
• Médecins Sans Frontières has urged donors and humanitarian organisations worldwide to pledge more in response to the increase of violence in Yemen, Anne Gulland writes. With WHO reporting that some 190 […]
Richard Smith: How to fill the void of evidence for everyday practice?
Some even most (depending on how you measure it) of what doctors do lacks strong evidence. Even when evidence exists it often doesn’t seem to be relevant to doctors—because their patients […]
The BMJ Today: Bias that keeps researchers awake at night
• Last week, we saw that prospective registration of trials with specific outcome measures could have a huge impact. Addressing this kind of publication bias is a great step forward, […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Call a spade a tool
Between 1975 and 2010, the prevalence of the word tool or tools in PubMed increased six-fold, to more than 3% of all PubMed articles. If you’re writing about a spade, […]
Manoj Kumar Pati: Road traffic injuries—an ignored public health issue in India
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 1.24 million road traffic deaths occur every year globally. Of those, the majority (80%) of deaths occur only in middle income countries. Yet the […]
The BMJ Today: Drug company payments, compassion, and patient centredness
• Should doctors be forced to disclose payments and hospitality from drug companies? The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry plans to bring in a system where healthcare professionals voluntarily […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Get shorty
Abbreviation of a word or phrase to a letter or two is the most extreme form of breakage that it can undergo. The process has variants: initialisms, contractions, and acronyms. […]
The BMJ Today: Food for thought, brain injury, and ovarian cancer
• Nutritional epidemiology As we learned this week that eating chillies could make us live longer, The BMJ’s acting head of research, Elizabeth Loder, discusses the pitfalls of nutritional epidemiology. High […]