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 […]
Category: Workforce
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 […]
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 […]
The Thinker 