Recently I attended a debate on aspects of the pharmaceutical industry. The venue was prestigious as was the audience. There were two speakers and each was given twenty minutes for […]
Guest writers
K M Venkat Narayan: India’s Emerging Demography: A Tale of Two Health Challenges
Given the sheer size and complexity of the country, it is always impossible to talk of India in any singular or modest sense. India has the largest population of young […]
Behrooz Astaneh: the culture of compliments
In a recent blog about guest authorship I mentioned that training plays a crucial role in persuading researchers to follow ethical guidelines in medical publishing. It is true that many researchers do […]
Olivia Roberts: Somaliland: no aid, no problem?
Somaliland doesn’t exist, officially. But a new paper suggests that there is still a lot for the international development community to learn. Somaliland has been unrecognised under international law since its […]
K M Venkat Narayan: Genetic Markers for Cardiovascular Disease and the Myth of Sisyphus
The massive global hunt for genes for common diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and type 2 diabetes, has raised huge expectations. The idea that knowledge of disease genes can […]
Behrooz Astaneh: Guest authorship – a vicious cycle
The ethics of guest authorship in biomedical publishing have been discussed for many years. A recent blog on this topic by Dr Barbour on the COPE website says that in […]
Martin McShane: Specialised
Commissioning of specialised services is done across the region. I had to drive to another county for the meeting where we were going to decide what to invest in. These […]
Louise Kenny: Gateshead to Guatemala
Strangely enough, I think I may have found it a more difficult transition returning back to work in the UK, than the initial challenge of starting work in Guatemala. Working […]
Richard Smith: Why is the health service so hopeless with domestic violence?
I’ve always thought that death, although universal, was the great taboo for health services, but now I’ve discovered something that seems to cause even greater difficulty for clinicians – domestic […]
Martin McShane: Tick
In 2008 the National Patient Safety Agency set a deadline for acute trusts to implement the safer surgery checklist. By? Well, now actually. If you don’t know what the checklist […]