“Universal health coverage is a human right.” This was a welcome statement from the new Director General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. [1] Europe, as one […]
Guest writers
Robert Kemp and Vinay Prasad: Should we accept higher p values than 0.05 for new cancer drugs?
The current regulatory system already tolerates a tremendous amount of uncertainty regarding cancer drugs in the real world and does not need more […]
Ollie Minton et al: Learning from deaths
The media have a longstanding interest in “avoidable deaths” in hospital. Recently, a particular reporting focus was on variation in mortality at the weekend. Predictably, this caused major controversy. Most […]
Joanna Erdman: The global abortion policies database—legal knowledge as a health intervention
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar died in an Irish hospital from miscarriage complications after being refused an abortion. The treating physicians believed that because the fetus still had a beating heart […]
Interpersonal, collective, and extremist violence are public health problems
Violence increasingly dominates the news. Be it sexual abuse of children, violence against women, alcohol-fuelled nightlife violence, or the pervasive threat of terrorism; each leaves victims suffering life-long harms, impacts […]
Ana Rosengurtt: Uruguay’s mandatory breast cancer screening is challenged
In 2006, it became mandatory for all women aged 40-59 in Uruquay to have a free mammography every two years, despite its National Cancer Registry showing a sustained decrease in […]
Miriam Fine-Goulden: Unmeasured interventions
For my next job application, ask me how I make people feel, because that’s what you really need to know […]
Fiona Sim: Obesity—personal responsibility or environmental curse?
To place all of the blame on the individual is to completely ignore the very real power of our surroundings […]
Sebastian Walsh: Do more with the students who come to our wards
When revising for medical school finals I used lists. Lists and lists of conditions, many of them rare, and many of which I hadn’t seen in practice yet. One such […]
Tom Treasure: The birth of heart surgery
The beginnings of heart surgery are known from the published record of momentous “first” operations on congenital and acquired malformations, retold in the biographies and reminiscences of the surgeons responsible […]