If you look at how the NHS is represented in the media, healthcare dramas tend to equal hospital dramas: Casualty, Holby City, even the marvellous Getting on. Community services often […]
Guest writers
Nancy Devlin, John Appleby, David Parkin: Why has the PROMs programme stalled?
In 2009, the English NHS introduced a world leading initiative in the pursuit of quality healthcare: the measurement of patients’ views about their own health became a routine part of […]
Yogesh Jain and Raman Kataria: The pathology of a public health tragedy
Lessons from the Bilaspur sterilization camp The recent deaths of 13 women in India operated on at a sterilization camp in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, has thrown up urgent questions on the delivery of […]
Eddie Chaloner: Kajaki—playing my part as medical adviser on a war film
It’s not every day that one is asked to get involved in making a major war film, so when I received an email about the Kajaki movie project through the […]
Nigel Hawkes: Searching for truth behind the taboos—or how science demystified sex
Serious students of sex, from Krafft-Ebing onwards, have not always had an easy time, possibly because some of them were distinctly odd. A new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in […]
John Illman: Richard Asher exhibition at the RSM
An exhibition celebrating Richard Asher (1912-69), perhaps the greatest medical wordsmith of his generation, opened last week at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Asher was acclaimed as a superb […]
Chris Ham: The NHS Five Year Forward View—the man matters more than the plan
Something very important happened on 23 October and it wasn’t the publication of the NHS Five Year Forward View. Far more important was the passion and confidence with which Simon Stevens […]
David Wrigley: Like another bad penny?
We have just seen another report from a London based “think tank,” suggesting profound changes to the way the NHS works. These reports seem to turn up with annoying regularity […]
Mary E Black: Inside the mind of a Member of Parliament
I had the opportunity to listen to a number of MPs explain how they think during the excellent Westminster experience organized by Cumberlege Eden & Partners as part of my […]
Cordelia Galgut: Emotional support through breast cancer
Before being diagnosed with primary breast cancer myself, aged 49 in 2004, I would offer emotional support to women with this diagnosis, and arrogantly assume I understood pretty well what […]