While I was reporting on a study for The BMJ, I suddenly felt as if I’d walked through Alice’s Looking Glass. You’ve possibly heard about the study by now: researchers […]
Month: February 2016
Richard Smith: Putting the H back into the NHS
The H in NHS stands not for hospital or healthcare but health, and the NHS needs to do better at promoting health, said Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . A penicillin anniversary
Today, 12 February, is the 75th anniversary of the first clinical use of penicillin in Oxford in 1941 (picture). Image: A plaque commemorating the first administration of purified penicillin to […]
Miriam Saey Al-Rifai: Midwestern adventures into the mind
My induction was interrupted by a loud siren bellowing out across County Buchannan. My supervisor, consultant forensic psychiatrist, Dr Reynolds, ran me out of the hospital into the courtyard shouting […]
Saurabh Jha: Britain’s junior doctors are not apprentices
It was Boxing Day weekend. The consultant surgeon summoned the on-call team. “We face a calamity,” he said. The house officer had called in sick. The locum wasn’t going to […]
Martin Marshall: Confused about general practice?
When I first became a GP, general practice was organised in a way that was so easy to describe to people. We had practices serving defined local communities and we […]
Desmond O’Neill: Combating bar stool gerontology
One of the greatest challenges for us as we age is “bar stool gerontology.” For most complex subjects—nuclear physics, molecular biology, or philosophy—most of us recognise that some learning and […]
Richard Smith: Doctors using safety and evidence for political ends
In my 40 years of messing around with medical journals I’ve tried to contribute to promoting patient safety and the use of evidence. Generally things seem better from a time […]
What, if anything, does the EuroHealth Consumer Index actually tell us?
Since 2005, the Health Consumer Powerhouse has produced its annual EuroHealth Consumer Index, ranking European health systems according to their performance on a host of indicators around (i) patient rights […]
Hoong-Wei Gan: Strike on, strike off: why junior doctors are fighting for their patients
Striking is not integral to any doctor’s identity. As others have pointed out over the last few months, a doctor pledges, before anything to else, to “first do no harm.” […]