The World Health Organisation has outlined what it considers the top issues on the health care horizon for the next decade and beyond. As usual with any large consensus organization, the issues outlined are like spent stars – they were shining brightly once but are probably dead already. Let’s redesign, rename, revamp and reinvest. So , rather […]
Category: Health care teams
The monosodium glutamate job is still around. The kind of job that satiates when you are in it …. but half an hour after leaving for the day, you feel empty and wonder, “Why I am still doing that job?” Then the next day you come back for more of the same. Most of these jobs are […]
It only takes a pandemic to see how countries can use healthcare to reignite flagging nationalism. COVID 19 spawned a new kind of nationalism: vaccine nationalism, the prioritization of the domestic needs of a country over an outlay to others. Even the policies of countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where nationalism is enforced by […]
Hospitals are full of sick people and not all of them are patients. More and more staff in hospitals are turning up for work that they are unable to do. They are present, but not working at their best, due to the impact of COVID-19 on their health and well-being. Every week there is another […]
Hospitals are full of people sick with CoVID but not all of them are patients. More and more staff in our hospitals are turning up for work that they are unable to do. They are present, but not working at their best, either due to their own health problems, increased CoVID-related workload, or CoVID anxiety. […]
What should a clinician wear when consulting with a patient? For many years the answer was simple: a white coat. A long one, if you were qualified, and a short one if you were in training. The white coat symbolized the clinician’s authority; until authority became a non-starter for some clinicians, such as psychiatrists and […]
In an environment where at least one in every two female clinicians has experienced some kind of sexual harassment during her working life, developing educational programs to change the culture don’t and won’t work. There just isn’t enough money or time or will. Besides, too much time and money continue to be wasted in exposing […]
Two decades into our new century and the pieces of the medical puzzle still don’t fit together. Administrators, algorithm developers and funders each form a rigid static piece, promoting standardization of services, while physicians and patients desire developing more customized pieces. The prospect of any union is poor – unless the pieces can fit organically […]
Creating a corpus of effective women leaders is the holy grail of health care. Everyone wants it, thinks it is a panacea, and reveres it almost as much as motherhood these days. Despite a plethora of strategies, the critical mass of women leaders required to ignite enduring change is elusive. In part, this is due […]
The UK and the USA have suffered more than their fair share of clinical crises within their health care systems. In the UK, neonates and the elderly are dying in inordinate proportions in hospitals. In the US, deadly infectious diseases are now carried out of the research labs into the wards of the most prestigious hospitals. More doctors […]
Under the surface, health care leadership is a stagnant pond filled with ever deepening chasms between the two rival schools – clinicians and managers. Clinical leadership is no longer about advocating for individual patients, especially about expensive interventions and hospital stays where there is little likelihood of these clinical decisions ever being substantiated by research. […]
Proportionate to the numbers, few women manage break to through the glass ceiling in health care and end up having to both lead and manage from below. In the US, whilst almost half of medical school graduates are women, less one in five of these women have positions as full professors and permanent department chairs. […]
Health care has a love affair with teams. Everybody wants to be a good team player. Not me. I’m still struggling with the distinction between groups and teams in health care. And I think I want to be a groupie. A lot of health care requires divergent thinking with the ability to converge when we […]
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