It’s hard for leaders to breathe life into health care these days because the atmosphere is so polluted by frequent restructuring. Clinical leaders and their teams lose the commitment that made them choose to work in health care in the first place. Teams are worn down by continual change without seeing any positive benefit. Leaders […]
Category: Healthcare
Just as dinosaurs became too big to roam the earth the demand for quality in health care has spawned enormous and unfathomable datasets that have outgrown their usefulness. I can live with that if I know that the reams of raw data are being used to underpin realistic, reliable, decisions. But they’re not. Right now […]
Between cure and death a lot occurs. It has a name: plateauing. And in treatment it means: do nothing and for some diseases it’s the perfect therapy. Take the Zika outbreak. We now know that patients with Zika and accompanying paralysis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, seem to go through a plateau phase (three to 10 days). The […]
Even today with broad access to good online information and a wealth of evidence about the myriad ways that disruptive technologies provide access to services, most of us still leave healthcare choices to trusted advisors – usually our doctors. What we don’t realize is that this behaviour is exactly what governments and private health insurers […]
Well, not exactly but disease should be dead and treatment should be reigning. In the 21st century, as we delve into the minutiae the body, the smaller we can see, the more we describe and define. But by using old methods of disease description we continue to differentiate rather than unify concepts and this results […]
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 […]
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 […]
A recent study found that the following terms – used by media to attract our attention especially on quiet news days – are no more than pollutants: “breakthrough”, “game changer”, “miracle”, “cure”, “home run”, “revolutionary”, “transformative”, “life saver”, “groundbreaking” and “marvel”. Researchers identified 36 drugs associated with these terms in press releases where the hyperbole […]
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 […]
It seems doctors and patients no longer share a commitment to the same vows. At least that is what a recent European study is suggesting after taking a robust look at whether patients and doctors are congruent in their views about what should happen during the consultation. Studies of the GULiVer-1 type of research are not […]
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 […]
It could be said that much of the health research done in the past three decades has been lost in a tsunami of health information. Just try iterating health data through even the most sophisticated search engines; your result will almost always be a sticky mass of disjointed facts. And once you’ve piled them up […]
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 […]
Not a day goes by without media reference to healthcare delivery. And whether rhetoric is emerging from a political, administrative or provider arena it’s always the same: ‘…healthcare is about the health of all patients not just those who can afford it…’; ‘…value and quality should drive patient services not fee-for-services rendered or bed occupancy’. […]
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