A recent article in The BMJ on the crisis in evidence based medicine (EBM) did a great job of both summarizing challenges that have developed over the past 20 years, and […]
Patient and public perspectives
Tessa Richards: Health 2.0—new technologies and e-patients
“All changed, changed utterly.” W B Yeats’s famous line was triggered by the Irish rebellion in 1916. Close to 100 years on, it could describe how digital technologies and social […]
Angela Coulter: Person centred care—what works?
“There’s no evidence that it works.” In these days of evidence based medicine, that’s a real clincher—a good reason to avoid a treatment or procedure that offers no proven value. […]
Ceinwen Giles: Patient leaders at the NHS Confederation Conference
As readers of The BMJ will know, leadership is a widely discussed and hotly debated topic across the NHS at the moment. It’s also a theme that permeated the NHS […]
Bev Fitzsimons: Practical tools to improve patients’ experience
At the King’s Fund, we have spoken a lot about the benefits of collective leadership lately. With the challenges currently facing the NHS, leaders at all levels across organisations need […]
Neal Maskrey: Seeing the world through a patient’s eyes
Captain Hawkeye Pierce of the 4077th MASH unit is one of the great fictional doctors. Battered by the US army, and brutalised by death and disfigurement in a war far […]
Judith Hibbard: How do people become good managers of their own health?
Within the general population some people actively focus on reaching and maintaining good health, while others are more passive about the whole thing. So what makes the difference? Is learning […]
Tessa Richards: The right to be supported to self manage disease
On the eve of the EU elections, reports and manifestos aimed at attracting the attention of newly elected MEPs and commission officials have been flowing thick and fast. A new […]
Tessa Richards: “All I ask is that you listen”
If healthcare was a patient, the diagnosis would be multimorbidity. There is a near terminal mix of fragmentation of services, failure to listen and respond to patients concerns, lack of […]
Tessa Richards: It’s time to turn healthcare upside down
March sees the picturesque town of Basel transformed as it celebrates Fastnacht. Masks are donned, people pour into the streets to the sound of piccolos and drums, and party. Transformation […]