From late March to late August I worked in two Greek camps for refugees as part of a joint Spanish-French Red Cross deployment to support the Hellenic Red Cross. Providing […]
Latest articles
Valentina Lichtner: Incorrect patient record selection
Recently the Wall Street Journal alerted its readers to a report by the ECRI Institute in the US on the common problem of patient misidentification. [1,2] The study found 7613 “wrong patient” […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—28 November 2016
NEJM 24 Nov 2016 Vol 375 AAA in UK & USA It grieves me to say it, but there are certain things that American medicine does better than British medicine. […]
Chris Simms: Path dependency—Trump, Brexit, and the future Europe
Barbara Tuchman begins her seminal work The March of Folly by observing that a “phenomenon noticeable through history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Melancholic
The fourth of Galen’s four fluid humours of the body, μέλαινα χολή, black bile, was associated, when in supposed excess, with a melancholic temperament, as defined in the OED: “Originally … […]
Amar Mashru: Passports, smokescreens, and the vanishing NHS budget
Chris Wormald, senior civil servant at the Department of Health, has suggested that patients should prove their eligibility for NHS care by showing their passport to receive treatment. The proposal […]
Jamie Murdoch: Nurse or non-clinician in the delivery of telephone triage?
The question of who should triage patients over the phone is critical to delivering safe and effective care and has become a contentious issue for healthcare systems. Belgium is currently […]
Trevor Plunkett: Dementia is not a disease
Recently I read in at least three daily newspapers that dementia is now the leading cause of death in the UK. It appears that such statements arise from figures supplied […]
Sara Hamilton: Pioneering open heart surgery
My brother died in 1964 at Guy’s Hospital. He was 15, I was 12. He had a congenital heart problem which I believe was a ventricular septal defect. He was […]
Desmond O’Neill: Technology and the medical humanities
One of the great challenges of progress in the medical humanities is that of time and space. Interested clinicians tend not to work in the arts blocks of universities, and […]