Perhaps 20, possibly 25 or even 30, years ago I had breakfast (or was it lunch?) with Geoffrey Marsh, a GP from Teesside, and he told me that all GPs […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: Nourishing the world
About a billion people end the day hungry, another billion are obese, and food prices are steadily rising. Clearly something is very wrong with the world’s food system, and the […]
Richard Smith: Teaching medical students online consultation with patients
A first year medical student of today may well still be practising in 2070. We can’t know how medicine will look then, but we can see some clear trends. The […]
Richard Smith: Will digitisation transform the NHS as it has much else?
Digitisation of the NHS will both save and improve it believe Jeremy Hunt, secretary of state for health, and Tim Kelsey, national director for patients and information at NHS England. […]
Richard Smith: Medical research—still a scandal
Twenty years ago this week the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled, […]
Richard Smith: Doctors and the Hollande affair
It’s hard not to be fascinated by Francois Hollande’s alleged (why do we keep bothering with this word?) affair with an actress with stories of two Parisian love nests, bags […]
Richard Smith: Taboo over the private sector limits health development
In most low and middle income countries the private sector accounts for 60-80% of outpatient care and 40-60% of inpatient care. Yet aid agencies have largely ignored the private sector, […]
Richard Smith: What is the future for hospices?
As I walked beside Clapham Common towards Trinity Hospice a famous BMJ phrase was ringing in my ears: “Hospice care is deluxe dying for the few looked after by dowager […]
Richard Smith: NCD among the bottom billion
My main job these days means thinking about non-communicable disease (NCD) in low and middle income countries (LMIC), but a paper in the Lancet suggests that I may be thinking […]
Richard Smith: Work from the 1950s that can help us reform healthcare today
One of the questions that occurred to many after the public inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust was “How could nurses and doctors behave like that and not do anything?” […]