“The NHS is under tremendous pressure,” I tell a novelist friend. “Could it die?” he asks. “I suppose it could.” “How would that happen?” How would it happen? That’s a […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
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, […]
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 […]
Richard Smith: Commissioning needs to be about all public services not just health
Parliament has three times relegislated the commissioner provider split—in 1990, 2002, and 2012, said Stephen Dorrell, secretary of state for health from 1995-97, in a talk to the Imperial College […]
Richard Smith: Calculating our debt to the old
My mother, who has had no short term memory for nine years, has lived in a nursing home for almost three years. I visit her most weeks, but I constantly […]
Richard Smith: Gawping at death
Around 4000 people a day visit El Museo De Las Momias (The Mummy Museum) in Guanjuato, making it one of the most popular tourist sites in Mexico. Some queue for […]
Richard Smith: Does the NHS meet the needs of junior doctors?
Bain, the global consultancy, produces what it calls “a pyramid of employee needs,” and on the day when junior doctors are striking it’s instructive to see how well the NHS […]
Richard Smith: Learning from ruins
Whenever I wander through ruins I imagine people centuries hence picking through the ruins of my world and wondering about the people who lived there. We can learn from ruins, […]
Richard Smith: Why are we doing so badly with hypertension?
Forty years ago at medical school I learnt the “rule of halves” that states that among those with a chronic disease, like hypertension, half are diagnosed, half of those diagnosed […]
Richard Smith: QMUL and King’s college should release data from the PACE trial
Several times when I was the editor of The BMJ the journal was declared the worst medical journal in the world by an ME association. Sometimes we shared the award with […]