In October and November 2024, Brian Lambert spent six weeks volunteering as a ‘medic’ at the Mavrovouni refugee camp on Lesvos, working for the Dutch charity the Boat Refugee Foundation (BRF).
The results of a recent BMA survey, which asked junior doctors what they felt about leaving the NHS, should send a shudder to the heart of the NHS, including through general practice upon which the health system stands.
Ben Hoban suggests that GPs can keep track of more in the consultation by not worrying about keeping track of so much, but instead choosing what to focus on.
Tim Senior argues that without GPs we systemically remove the part of the health system that has researched and trained in handling relationships and complexity, and is capable of doing this well. We need to be able to describe what health systems
What are safe workload limits in general practice, and how can these limits be implemented in practice? Nada Khan investigates.
in 2022 Richard Armitage altruistically donated a kidney. He discusses what GPs need to know in order to support patients who choose to go through this process themselves.
...despite all that science has to tells us in general terms about people and how to care for them, it is often harder to pin down on specifics...
Ayesha Siddiqui has compiled a list of a few basic steps each member of GP practice staff (clinical and non-clinical) can adopt in our day to day working lives towards reducing our carbon foot print.
Over the last 50 years society has become progressively diverse as the needs of the population continue to change. As these diversities become increasingly recognised, it has resulted in differences becoming more pronounced and the possibility of discrimination thus becoming more prominent.
ChatGPT is an online program allowing a user to ask any question and receive an answer, which can be incredibly detailed, in under 10 seconds. However, what does this mean for primary care? Richard Armitage investigates and puts ChatGPT to the test,
For 30 years advocates1 for social justice and the environment (have called for full cost accounting with a triple bottom line2 where all the consequences of a business are made transparent. These are its social, environmental and economic impacts and outcomes.
The idea of excess deaths is of course just an attempt to make sense of what’s happening in a complex system with a view to allocating resources appropriately.
"The cost-of-living crisis is descending like a dark cloud and its heavy weight is palpable. As a Deep End GP, every day I see the real impact poverty is having on my patients ... "
Seeing patients once and referring them for imaging offers advantages to busy GPs and busy patients alike, but given the tendency of any test to throw up results of unclear significance, wouldn’t we simply be delegating the management of uncertainty en masse
Richard Armitage finds that general anaesthesia is in fact quite unlike sleep in its most fundamental components.
Recent data suggest on average 13 600 beds in NHS hospitals across England are occupied every day by patients whom doctors say are ‘medically fit for discharge’. Is it that simple? Here, Peter Levin delves into the complexity of the term 'medically
Occasionally, the worlds of media and healthcare can clash in a way that has pronounced consequences in the real world. Whilst the media may intend to inform, they invariably end up influencing a somewhat frenzied, albeit predictable, behaviour in the public.
Assessing the effectiveness of each charitable project and directing financial donations to the one that ranks highest is certainly a task of gargantuan proportions. Richard Armitage explains.
New research by Kathryn B Cunningham and colleagues presents three key elements concerning the process of connection in indirect route social prescribing schemes (those involving link workers). Here, the authors summarise their findings ...
NHS chiefs and policy-makers should be cautious about assuming that diverting patients to the private sector will take pressure off the NHS and reduce NHS waiting times.
Today is my third “Cancerversary..." I am so lucky to be working in a great practice. With a supportive team – clinicians who truly care. But I just don’t know if this is enough...
Internet shutdowns are government interventions motivated to intentionally disrupt access to, and the use of, online information and communication systems. These measures pose a novel and growing threat to various elements of global public health.
Why have poverty and fuel poverty become medicalised? We know that social determinants of health shape and drive health outcomes. Poverty and fuel poverty are increasingly positioned within a biopsychosocial model of medicine and health.
Uptake of national screening programmes suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, but how are uptake numbers faring post-pandemic? Richard Armitage presents the data ...
As FIFA excitement reaches fever pitch, it’s squeaky bum time for health care services already struggling with long wait times, capacity issues and a workforce crisis.
We attend reputable GP-training events and feel confident that the training delivered will be up to date and relevant. And yet, there's something about menopause where all this somehow falls apart.
The editor, Euan Lawson, discusses Mastodon, the new elephant in the social media room.
In 1946, the Constitution of the World Health Organization defined health as 'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity'. Ever since, this definition has been widely criticised and many alternatives have
While various definitions of health have been offered over recent centuries, the search for an enduring and completely satisfying definition has proven frustratingly elusive. Richard Armitage wrestles with one of the most recent and promising definitions.
In my early years of practice, I thought the very act of named diagnosis was a victory. As time has progressed ... I have grown to realise that this semantic box does not in itself contain the cure, and sometimes, can contain
"On my clinical days, I focus on the micro-level of health care. Thinking about the macro-level of things, including the politics of it all, tends to send my heart rate up when I am in the thick of clinical practice. Am I
While no GPs or other celebrity doctors have featured on the cast of any previous I’m a Celeb series, it seems far from impossible for such an event to transpire. Richard Armitage ponders...
The clocks going back as we descend into winter each year generates an additional hour that we generally choose to spend asleep. A poignant philosophical reflection on time.
I’d imagine that a fair few of my colleagues can relate to the fact that most days, I feel like a walking, talking pie chart, cut up into colour-coded segments. Are we so lost in the political drive to provide access, that
In an age of mass-production and commodification it is not surprising that the governmental response to our increasing losses of doctors is to recurrently and rhetorically press for greater production and wider recruitment. But in doing so are we avoiding deeper human
Twitter has undoubtedly become the world’s digital town square, and provides the soapbox upon which contemporary issues and political dialogue are played out in real time. Richard Armitage explores the Twittersphere in the wake of Elon Musk's takeover.
The growing SAS workforce, and the stalling growth of the GP workforce, combined with warnings of a mass exodus from the profession, has clearly got people thinking. The GMC report suggests that the solutioninvolves shifting the SAS workforce into general practice.
The winning submission of the Royal Society of Medicine John Fry Prize by Salwa Ahmad.
Although the doctor-patient relationship works in favour of promoting healing, it may not be sufficient.
Doctors are inordinately fond of nouns. By and large, patients come to us not just with nouns, but with stories which include them but are driven along by verbs, words of action, backed up by adverbs, pronouns, and so on...
Should healthcare professionals ever strike? For some healthcare professionals, going on strike crosses a professional and moral line. Nada Khan explores the debate.