Decisions about healthcare inevitably involve choices around the allocation of finite resources. Democracy, if it is meaningful, is public reasoning. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), established […]
Nick Hopkinson
Nick Hopkinson: What is breathing worth? The economic cost of lung disease
It is no secret that the UK healthcare system is under strain. The percentage of GDP spent on healthcare is projected to fall to 6.6% by 2020/21, back to the same […]
Nick Hopkinson: Why an academic boycott of Trump’s America is misguided
How should a European clinical academic react to the fact that the US election appears to have sent a racist, misogynist, climate change denier to the White House? One response, […]
Nick Hopkinson: Bad air, poor memory
One explanation that has been offered for the UK’s self-destructive decision to leave the European Union is that there are now few people left alive who can remember the ruined […]
Nick Hopkinson: NHS humanitarian crisis denial
When I qualified as a doctor in 1993, trolley medicine was completely routine. Post take ward rounds would typically visit people who had been waiting patiently in corridors overnight or […]
Nick Hopkinson on Steve Biko, the NHS, and the mind of the oppressed
It would have been Steve Biko’s seventieth birthday this weekend. The anti-apartheid leader was beaten to death by the South African Police in a jail cell in 1977. His death […]
Nick Hopkinson: Air quality—what’s the point of warnings?
The Thames is wreathed in smog—the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, issues an air quality alert and announces a new system of air quality warnings. There will be road-side dot […]
Nicholas S Hopkinson reviews “The state of medicine”
“I am furious, sad, and scared for the NHS” —Margaret McCartney’s opening words in the introduction to her latest, timely book, The State of Medicine (Pinter and Martin 2016). Understandable sentiments, […]
Nick Hopkinson: Saving the NHS—a lesson from Carthage
Cato the Elder is said to have concluded every speech he made in the Roman Senate, regardless of the topic, with “Delenda est Carthago”—Carthage must be destroyed. In answering the […]
Nick Hopkinson: The burden of asthma—how to frame it and what needs to be done?
A study this week from the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research at the University of Edinburgh, widely reported in the media, estimates that asthma costs the UK £1.1 billion/year […]