Who should resign this week? The blame game continues with more Mid Staffs finger pointing. As newspapers identify further unpleasant aspects of the wider tragedy, there is a risk that […]
Latest articles
B Ramana: Have health budgets changed much for India?
Last week India’s Union budget was passed by the Union finance minister P. Chidambaram. It was met with mixed reactions by markets and pundits. As a healthcare professional interested in […]
Balaji Ravichandran: Sugar is the new tobacco
Sugar is the new tobacco. It is dangerous, addictive, and toxic, and it cannot be controlled by education or legislation alone. This is a war, between public health and private […]
Richard Smith: The NHS and the private sector: a 70 year conversation
We’ve been having this conversation since at least 1945, said a member of the audience at this week’s Cambridge Health Network meeting on partnerships between the NHS and the private […]
Readers’ editor blog: Patient consent
Last year a colleague phoned a patient named in a BMJ practice article. The patient had consented to her story being published (it was about to go live), but had […]
Elizabeth Loder: Inventing disease and pushing pills
The recent 2013 Selling Sickness conference in Washington, DC was chock full of fascinating speakers. In an earlier blog I discussed my participation in a panel discussion at the conference, […]
David Zigmond: “Fixing the NHS is straightforward.” Really?
In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Gerry Robinson tells us that “fixing the NHS is straightforward.” He writes with optimistic alacrity of pragmatic, logistical, data-fuelled managerial devices to sharpen […]
Desmond O’Neill: A sad day for human rights in Ireland
It is perhaps stating the obvious that the best mode for exercising human rights is while still alive: as the Vikings stated rather bluntly in their eddaic saga Hávamál, “there […]
Pritpal S Tamber: We don’t know what the NHS is for
Last week the people of Leeds successfully halted the NHS’ plans to reform children’s heart services, which included moving surgery to a neighbouring city. It was a great victory for […]
Tony Delamothe: TED 2013
The 29th annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, started as I remember several previous TEDs began: with two men with newly published books to sell proposing a future that […]