In Portugal, general practitioners (GPs) are considered “specialists,” as general practice/family medicine is considered a specialty like any other hospital specialty. This is also the case in many other European […]
Columnists
Muir Gray: What is helping?
Raymond Tallis’ excellent Times article on Humanity on 17 February made me reflect on helping, a topic about which I had been forced to rethink by Edgar Schein’s new book […]
Martin McShane: One organisation?
In a recent letter Sir David Nicholson began to make clearer how he sees the NHS commissioning board and GP commissioners working together. It is a very important letter and […]
Richard Smith: How can we encourage innovation in the NHS?
How can we encourage innovation in the NHS? Niti Pall, a GP and entrepreneur from Birmingham, asked herself this question and hit upon the idea of asking all the people […]
Sandra Lako: Operation oxygen was a success
Over the Christmas holiday $11,760 was raised for oxygen concentrators for the Children’s Hospital in Sierra Leone. This is enough for at least 8 new concentrators. Last year I was […]
David Kerr on Barack Obama’s visit to Silicon Valley
Here on the edge of Silicon Valley we have just had a visit from Barack Obama. His schedule included closed door meetings with the tsars of technology; Jobs (Apple), Zuckerberg […]
Liz Wager: Mournful numbers
I love the fact that many words have multiple meanings. This multiplicity sometimes sets up strange resonances or odd mental images, especially if you pick the wrong meaning initially. The […]
Richard Smith: Competition versus integration
“Competition in health care should be tactical not ideological.” That was the main message from a recent debate on “Competition versus integration in the NHS” organised by the Cambridge Health […]
Richard Smith: How to get people in the NHS to act on environmental sustainability?
“There’s a 50% chance that humans will be extinct by the end of the century because of climate change,” said Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health, […]
David Kerr: Social medicine
“The UK coalition government’s proposals for health reform have generated much heat without a great deal of light. One predictable response has been the “concern” that the private sector is […]