I’ve blogged before about the impact of austerity on healthcare, mainly on the hard hit Portuguese healthcare system. And just when I thought things have already gone too far, new […]
Columnists
David Kerr: Crowd sourcing clinical research
Taxpayers in the UK fund the NHS but are rarely asked directly about how the money should be spent. A few years ago local patients with diabetes were asked what […]
Desmond O’Neill: Think global, act local
Visiting Kennebunkport, Maine, in winter is a surreal experience, almost akin to playing an extra in the Truman Show. Neat clapper board houses and snow encrusted churches cluster around a […]
Muir Gray: Developing a system budget
Read the rest of this series of blogs about designing and planning population based systems of care here. Step 8: Developing a system budget One of the aims of developing […]
Liz Wager: Follow the rules—as soon as we’ve written them
One of my most vivid schoolday memories is of being told off for doing something I didn’t know was forbidden. My crime was “running in the school corridors” which seemed […]
Paul Glasziou: Most innovations are not advances: innovation + evaluation = progress
Innovation is currently fashionable. But new is not necessarily better [1]. Progress rests in sifting out the effective innovations. Edison clearly understood this process: when he developed the light bulb, […]
Desmond O’Neill: Turner, medical history, and ageing
Limiting access adds savour to most sensory experiences, a sentiment captured by Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Advent: “through a chink too wide comes in no wonder.” A narrow aperture […]
Kieran Walsh: Should we be more short term in our thinking about medical education?
Putting the horse before the cart always seems like a sensible idea. And so it is with funding initiatives—it seems sensible to invest in starting up sustainable projects that will […]
Liz Wager: You can call me 0000-0002-4202-7813
I just registered for an ORCID ID—I’m 0000-0002-4202-7813 in case you were wondering, but I still answer to Liz. I know I’ve written about ORCID before, but that was before […]
Richard Smith: Multiplicity: the power of the many, or what we can learn from Barcelona FC
Last month some 500 of us gathered in Bologna to remember Alessandro Liberati, founder of the Italian Cochrane Centre, a great thinker about health, and a personal friend to most […]