I recently visited a new McDonald’s outlet on the northern fringes of Sydney. What I found inside left me gawping in astonishment: soft lighting, views of nature, a mixture of private and communal spaces…
Do official inquiries and reports make any difference to how we run and regulate the NHS? It’s a year since Robert Francis published his findings following the high profile failings at Mid Staffordshire…
The use of medicine as an “instrument of violence” in both the Iraq War and the Syrian conflict shows how blurred the lines between civilian and combatant spaces can become. According to the authors of…
For people with learning disabilities the world can be a bewildering and strange place to get to grips with, but in hospitals it can be even worse. Sometimes members of staff at a busy hospital simply…
Florence Nightingale was a practical, highly experienced nurse who advocated the role of beauty, aesthetics and nature in medical practice. She believed buildings with windows, beautiful views, central…
We expect just as much from our ambulance services as we do from accident and emergency departments. But under-resourced and overstretched health systems mean ambulance staff are increasingly under pressure…
The “crisis in A&E” has dominated headlines for months, with attention focused mainly on inexorably rising demand, ageing populations, and increased waiting times. In his much anticipated report into…
Bacteria-eating viruses that kill the hospital superbug C. difficile have been isolated by scientists. The use of these kinds of viruses, known as phages, to tackle bacterial infection was employed before…
With so many lurid reports of violence on our TV screens, it’s easy to think that the police know about all or most incidents. But they don’t. The National Crime Victimisation Survey in the US and the…
Walking into each room to greet my next patient often reminds me of Forrest Gump: “You never know what you’re going to get.” It’s challenging to have only one chance to get it right but I love being an…
The subject of mental health and illness often raises philosophical and ethical issues and fundamental questions revolve around the definition of mental illness – how are health and illness defined, who…
Claims that doctors are sectioning mental health patients in order to get them access to beds on psychiatric wards amount to “more than anecdotal evidence”, according to a committee of MPs who have just…
A campaign to prevent a downgrade of Lewisham Hospital in south-east London was given a significant boost after a high court judge ruled that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and others were acting beyond…
I lost my job in 2010 after raising concerns about staff shortages and patient safety in the NHS. But despite the NHS Chief Executive’s promise to intervene for whistleblowers and a tribunal in my favour…
One of the key platforms of the first Rudd government was to reform the health and hospital system. The key message from then-prime minister Kevin Rudd was that the health, and particularly hospitals…
It’s a traditional part of the theatre of health policy for trade unionists to give secretaries of state for health a hard time. The latest example of this was the vote of no confidence in Jeremy Hunt…
Gwyn Bevan, London School of Economics and Political Science
Data on hospital performance often shows a wide variation and this poses the question of whether it should be available to the public or kept confidential. The government wants more transparency and announced…
New research linking less access to GPs and higher demand in Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments could ignite the row over the A&E crisis. The number of people visiting A&E in England…
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne