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 […]
Category: Healthcare
Is it time we let computers drive our medical care? According to the World Health Organization, there was a global shortage of 7.2 million health providers in 2013, and this figure will to increase to 12.9 million by 2035. Establishing new medical schools, which every country has adopted, isn’t a long term solution. Increasing the […]
The number of people going online to seek out health information has doubled in the last decade, from over 30% to over 60%. The patient community is dichotomising rapidly into health technologists, who use online resources frequently and health traditionalists, who seldom use the Internet. Today, three out of every four North Americans use commercially […]
Medicine is a multinational industry no longer defined by country boundaries. Its main product is a workforce. It is time to disrupt our rigid health care so that it can bend For example, doctors now can work autonomously and remotely from their traditional locations for at least some of their work-time. Radiologists, for example, now […]
Risks are ephemeral. Once identified they are no longer risks but problems to be solved. Risks that cannot or should not be problematized need to be abandoned. In the most positive light, identifying risks should only be a first step in a long pathway of improvement. First, the risk must be linked to a behaviour […]
The end of the summer holidays always signals a spate of new television and internet dramas. Medical dramas, in particular, are very cost effective for the television and streaming industries. Sets are simple. There are stock storylines that can be regularly recycled, such as cancer, rape, accidental injury, and paralysis. Usually there is only one […]
Our health care systems are dying under their own weight. They are morbidly obese. They keep on eating up our resources with a voracious appetite. Like clinical obesity, it is not a single problem, but a complex growth that arises from the interaction between our genetic make up, our bodies, our communities and the environment […]
Violence is endemic in our hospitals. In the US, over half of all emergency room staff are threatened by people bearing weapons at least once in their working lives. It is widely reported in the nursing literature, however mentioned much less in the medical literature. Violent thoughts and actions should be expected – they are […]
Governments change. Heads of state change, but what really happens behind the frenzied ADHD of electioneering? The effect on hospitals is very difficult to assess. Paper money and promises abound, but we can never really tell whether decision makers have enough power and status in their hospitals to affect any change during their time on […]
In these troubled times, we all like to hear good news and health care is one area that seems to abound with uplifting language. Daily posts about “cures” and “new treatments” raise our spirits and are antidotes to the bleak predictions about shrinking health services and budgets. Even “groundbreaking”, which usually refers to some treatment […]
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. […]
Hospitals are full of sick people and 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 health problems or other events that are distracting them or both. It […]
The consequences of the challenge to the Affordable Care Act will extend beyond the US. Whilst woefully inadequate, the Act at least tried to address some of the inequities in health care in the US. On the side lines, countries such as the UK which have national health schemes, have remained silent and self-righteous, resting […]
Health care can‘t keep surviving on unlimited credit cards, even though the role of health funders, both public and private, has shifted from providers to financiers. There needs to be an alternative method for funding our health microenvironment and microservices. The only way for funders to balance their books these days is to restrict services […]
Support medicine based on individuals; not paper. Encourage responsive practice; based on divergent thinking with the ability to converge when necessary. Commit to genuine funding for health, that is, ten percent GDP for ten years from government and private sector. Ensure that hospitals remain places for treating sick people, not making those who treat them […]
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 […]
I’ve just participated in a public debate: “This house believes that Brexit will not affect health innovation”. I was on the opposing site. Have you ever been in a debate where if you win you lose? That’s where I found myself. Because if we won, the future is bleak. And if we lost, the future […]
Medicine is a multinational industry no longer defined by country boundaries. Its main product is a workforce. Like the other major product, pharmaceuticals, clinicians are highly regulated and competitively priced. Unlike pharma however, the “product” has not evolved nor are there a succession of new and better models on the market. Postgraduate medical training is […]
I n this era of personalized medicine there is nothing general anymore. So why do we persist with terms so wholly inappropriate to the kind of care delivered in the community by doctors? “Family medicine” as a term has the scope to address the newer genetic aspects of our work but still misses out on […]
Being an olympian is a dangerous occupation. In the sixteen days of competition one in ten athletes will sustain an injury during the games. Of these injuries one in three will prevent the athlete from competing or continuing to compete. During the games we only hear of the spectacular injuries and so far in Rio, […]
The Thinker 