As a GP who works in prison healthcare, I was saddened and shocked to hear what occurred at HMP Birmingham recently. The government had to take over control from a […]
Month: August 2018
Danny Keenan and Kieran Mullan: Making quality improvement easier
If we want clinical leaders to act on data for quality improvement, we need to make easy access a priority […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Non-drugs
As I discussed last week, definitions should preferably not include negations. Some terms that denote drug classes break this rule. Non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs), for example, form a […]
Sarah Markham: Independent review of the mental health act—including patients at the heart of the review
It is now almost a year since the prime minister Theresa May announced an independent review of mental health legislation and practice to tackle the issue of mental health detention. […]
Bruce Hugman: The assault on Enlightenment values is a threat to us all
Civilisation is fragile; only weak restraints prevent us from falling into barbarity. From 1945 until around 1980, those restraints were largely underpinned by the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and […]
Rodolfo Saracci: The public health community must speak out on rising rates of migrants dying at sea
Migrants continue to drown in the Mediterranean sea attempting to reach Europe. [1] On 20 August, Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, refused authorisation for a group of 177 refugees and […]
Michael Myers: The complexity of physician suicide
Physicians take their own lives when many diverse and overwhelming forces come together all at once—a perfect storm of biopsychosocial factors. There is no one reason why a physician might […]
Richard Smith: What I learnt from brief encounters with a GP whose obituary I’ve just read
I find that at age 66 the obituary pages of The BMJ usually include each week at least one person I’ve known. Often the obituaries bring back memories, some exciting […]
Ricky Frazer: Doctor through the patient lens
From doctor to inpatient—Ricky Frazer discovered some key lessons for healthcare professionals […]
Abraar Karan: Changing the way we communicate about patients
The way we communicate can reinforce a culture in which people become another case of “X” disease […]