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: Hospitals
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. […]
CoVID-19 is all about lungs and breathing. As the infection increases in seriousness so the need for breathing assistance becomes greater. Critical and intensive care units (ICUs) provide the optimal support for these life-threatening breathing problems. But are they ready for the expected surge in cases? There will never be enough ICU beds. Overall, critical […]
Doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals have a long history of wearing face masks in clinical environments, but I’ve never seen a person in scrubs walking down the street in a face mask. That look is generally reserved to tourists, particularly from Japan and China, who wear masks as they see the sights. Surgical […]
My stethoscope is more than half my age and every year it gets proportionally closer to my age. It doesn’t have an expiration date and works just fine. In fact, not everything in medicine has a short expiration date or is consumable. Despite that, the traditional economy of healthcare is largely disposable. Healthcare materials are taken […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Much is made of the need for strong leaders in healthcare. Yet increasing regulation and a fiscally restrictive environment leaves little room to manoeuvre for even the most effective healthcare leaders. For consumers searching for visionary leadership, hospitals (inanimate, often impoverished and frequently imperfect) by their sheer physical presence are emerging as the most visible […]
The Thinker 