More than 30% of all medicines in many African and Asian countries are falsified, rising to 50% for antibiotics making the fake drug market more lucrative than fake handbags and fake watches. Here in the Western world Interpol and other agencies are struggling to keep online drug sales below 1%. But they’re growing, even Tory […]
Category: Health policy
Medical knowledge has exploded and future doctors need more training to be competent, or so the argument goes. But has our obsession with length of courses blown undergraduate medical education and postgraduate medical training courses out of proportion? Today, if you want to be a general practitioner you’ll spend your first five years at medical […]
Hospital stays in the UK are at an all time high, in part, because geriatric and palliative care wards have become default locations for patients with multiple health problems who rotate in an in an end-of-life, time-share mode until they die. But patients with multiple and complex problems such as diabetes, poor circulation and depression […]
Doctor numbers and dissatisfaction with working hours are foremost in the minds of clinicians and health politicians these days. We’re in short supply of the former and burdened with the latter, which may explain the resurfacing of non face-to-face (F2F) clinician/patient initiatives. The CHAT program, an initiative of a team of Australian anesthetists, is one […]
How to stay current and clinically competent is an ongoing challenge for clinicians who cover a lot of clinical ground in one day. Most of us make valiant efforts to stay up to date, usually spurred on by inquisition, patients and recertification requirements – though not necessarily in that order. For decades it has been […]
Going into hospital these days is like embarking on a voyage: the doctor provides the ticket, the nurse conducts us to our bed and from then on we hurtle through the hospital corridors from one stop to the next anxiously watching for signs to our anticipated destination. What used to be termed a hospital stay […]
When venture capitalist Martin Shrekli recently bought a pharmaceutical company and repackaged and repriced, by 5000%, an old drug that HIV patients use to treat fungal infection, he set the world of pharmaceutical pricing on fire. That kind of maverick decision by Shkreil made me, for one, realize how much our wellbeing is at the […]
In 1978 the WHO produced the Alma Ata Declaration and by promoting health, as opposed to treating illness, radically changed the face of healthcare. Today its lofty aspiration: “the attainment of the highest possible level of health” is just another 21century commodity with goods and services traded by governments, insurers and providers. But the more […]
The UK’s recent summer budget was certainly operating on summer time when the Chancellor reiterated his commitment to 8am to 8pm GP service delivery despite professional resistance and continuing evidence warning of the risks of such an edict. The extension of working hours is, at best, a band-aid solution to a festering wound, which could be lethal if its […]
Determining value in contemporary healthcare has always been a matrix of competing and synergistic forces primarily driven by clinical parameters, costs and patients…until recently. Earlier this year The American Society of Clinical Oncology attempted to unpack and quantify the matrix through the identification of five categories: Clinical benefit (as determined by survival), Toxicity, Palliation (a […]
In this day and age few among us could claim to be in the dark about the value of exercise to our wellbeing and longevity. The fitness industry mushroomed during the latter half of the last century; today our marketplace is flooded with watches and other gimmicks to help us track measure and maintain our […]
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