The world bank was set up in 1944. In the aftermath of the second world war, the institution was there to give loans to countries rebuilding after the conflict. Their first loan went to France - but with stipulations about repayment that set a tone for future funds. A new series, authored by Devi Sridhar, and her team from the University of...

The world bank was set up in 1944. In the aftermath of the second world war, the institution was there to give loans to countries rebuilding after the conflict. Their first loan went to France - but with stipulations about repayment that set a tone for future funds. A new series, authored by Devi Sridhar, and her team from the University of...

The world bank was set up in 1944. In the aftermath of the second world war, the institution was there to give loans to countries rebuilding after the conflict. Their first loan went to France - but with stipulations about repayment that set a tone for future funds. A new series, authored by Devi Sridhar, and her team from the University of...

If you google "The NHS" you'll see screaming headlines from the Daily Mail about cost and waste - debate in parliament is about how much of our GDP we should be spending - and each year, hospital trusts go cap in hand to ask for more funding. Against this backdrop, a new analysis, and a first in a series, published on bmj.com, looks at what it...

One of the hurdles that anyone who submits research or analysis to The BMJ has to deal with is peer review. The problems of the process, and some of the potential solutions, was a big part of the Peer Review Congress which took place last week. In this interview, Sophie Cook, The BMJ's UK research editor, talks to Lisa Bero, who’s a professor...

In the UK - type 2 diabetes now affects between 5-10% of the population - and accounts for around 10% of our total NHS budget. For the individuals affected, treatments are effective at helping control glucose levels - however, the sequela associated with the disease - vascular problems, and a life expectancy that’s 6 years shorter - are still an...

Choosing Wisely was launched in the US, to much fanfare. Since then the movement has spread around the world, with successful chapters set up in Canada, Australia Brazil, Italy, Japan, new Zealand - and most recently the UK. The campaigns have not been without criticism – from how individual recommendations were chosen, to the way in which...

Should we welcome plans to sell off NHS land? The government seems likely to back the recommendations of Robert Naylor (national adviser on NHS property and estates) to raise capital by selling off inefficiently used assets, but Kailash Chand (GP) worries that services could be threatened and that public consultation is lacking. Read the Head...

If you're a patient in the UK, increasingly, your first interaction with the healthcare system won't be the traditional face to fact chat with your doctor - instead you'll have a telephone consultation. The prevalence of these telephone consultations is increasing, and being promoted by CCGs and private companies who administer them - usually as...

There's a crisis in old age care - not just in the UK, around the world, as population demographics shift, and the proportion of older people increase - there's a worry about who's going to look after them, and how much is it going to cost? However, a new analysis on bmj.com says this picture need not be so gloomy - they say that encouraging...

As journal editors, we’re aware of the fact that we have a role to play in scientific discourse - that’s why The BMJ has been so keen to talk about the way in which scientific knowledge is constructed, through our Evidence Manifesto. We also know that money has influence in the scientific literature - which is why we have a zero tolerance policy...

The Three Talk Model of shared decision is a framework to help clinicians to think about how to structure their consultation to ensure that shared decision making can most usefully take place. The model is based around 3 concepts - option talk, decision talk, and team talk - with active listening at the centre. Three Talk was first proposed in...

Assessing young people with possible eating disorders can be complex for a variety of reasons. Building a therapeutic relationship with a young person with a possible eating disorder and their family is key to enabling a thorough assessment and ongoing management, but it introduces difficult issues regarding confidentiality and risk. In this...

Assessing young people with possible eating disorders can be complex for a variety of reasons. Building a therapeutic relationship with a young person with a possible eating disorder and their family is key to enabling a thorough assessment and ongoing management, but it introduces difficult issues regarding confidentiality and risk. In this...

Acute respiratory distress syndrome was first described in 1967 and has become a defining condition in critical care. Around 40% of patients with ARDS will die, and survivors experience long term sequelae. No drug treatments exist for ARDS, however good supportive management reduces harm and improves outcome. In this podcast, John Laffey,...

Winter pressures on NHS services have kicked in a little bit earlier than usual. So here to discuss that, and also the issue of how local NHS leaders can support staff in times of extreme pressure. Discussing that with Rebecca Coombes, The BMJ’s head of news and views, are Matthew Inada-Kim, a consultant in acute and general medicine at...

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer is a new strategy that was introduced towards the end of the 20th century with the aim of reducing tumour size - rendering an otherwise inoperable tumour operable, allowing more conservative surgery, and hopefully improving overall survival. Although data indicate that the first rationale remains valid,...

Trial MVA85A - monkey trials for a booster vaccine for BCG, developed by researchers at Oxford University, is the subject of an investigation published on bmj.com. Experts warn that today’s investigation is just one example of “a systematic failure” afflicting preclinical research and call for urgent action “to make animal research more fit for...

Many older adults have difficulty understanding speech in acute healthcare settings owing to hearing loss, but the effect on patient care is often overlooked. Jan Blustein professor of health policy and medicine at New York University, and who has also experienced the affects of hearing loss, joins us to explain what that's like, and gives some...

Virginia Murray, public health consultant in global disaster risk reduction at Public Health England, was instrumental in putting together the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction - an international agreement which aims to move the world from reacting to disasters, to proactively preventing them. In this podcast, she explains what they...

We know that smoking 20 cigarettes a day increases your risk of CHD and stroke - but what happens if you cut down to 1, do you have 1/20th of that risk? Allan Hackshaw, professor of epidemiology at UCL joins us to discuss a new systematic review and meta analysis published on bmj.com, examining the risk of smoking just one or two cigarettes a...

Bobbie Farsides is professor of clinical and biomedical ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. She’s been described as one of the few people that is acceptable to “both sides” of the assisted dying debate. This week she joins us to talk about the way in which the debate on euthanasia has played out in the UK - and hear why she thinks it’s...

Sabine Netters is an oncologist in The Netherlands - where assisted dying is legal. There doctors actually administer the drugs to help their patients die (unlike proposed legislation in the UK). In this moving interview, Sabine explains what was going through her head, the first time she helped her patient die - and how in the subsequent years,...

A study published by The BMJ today reports a possible association between intake of highly processed (“ultra-processed”) food in the diet and cancer. Ultra-processed foods include packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, ready meals and reconstituted meat products - often containing high levels of sugar, fat, and salt, but...

In a new analysis John McArthur and Krista Rasmussen, from the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution, and Gavin Yamey from Duke University, have set out to analyse the potential for lives saved by the goals set in the Sustainable Development Goals In this conversation I talked to Gavin and John about the numbers,...

Our latest debate asks, should doctors recommend acupuncture for pain? Asbjørn Hróbjartsson from the Center for Evidence-based Medicine at University of Southern Denmark argues no - evidence show's it's no worse than placebo. Mike Cummings, medical director of the British Medical Acupuncture Society argues yes - that there is evidence of efficacy,...

That’s Jo Shapiro is a surgeon and manager in Brigham and Women’s hospital, she’s also director of the Center for Professionalism and Peer Support, and has written an editorial for The BMJ on tackling unprofessional behaviour. In this discussion, she and I talked about what she thinks (beyond the illegal) are the most damaging behaviours seen...

Ravi Gupta, is a resident in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore - and as he said has seen the influence of sudden price hikes on his patients - between 2010 and 2015 more than 300 drugs in the U.S. have seen sudden increases of over %100. Ravi and his co-authors have suggested, and tested the feasibility of, a possible answer to...

The first digital banking in the UK was launched in 1983, Skype turns 15 this year, but 2017 finally saw panic over the impact that online consultations may have on general practices. In this podcast Martin Marshall, professor of healthcare improvement at University College London joins us to discuss whether video conference actually is a...

In 2016, from an estimated pre-war population of 22 million, the United Nations (UN) identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance, of which more than 6 million are internally displaced within Syria, and around 5 million are refugees outside of Syria. In this podcast, Aula Abarra, consultant in infectious disease from London,...

We talk about financial conflicts of interest a lot atThe BMJ - and have take taken the decision that our educational content should be without them. We also talk a lot about non-financial conflicts of interest, but the choppy waters of those are much more difficult to navigate. In this podcast, we discuss whether we should, or if we could even...

Worldwide, the rate of type II diabetes is estimated to be around 1 in 11 people - about 9%. For the Pima people of Arizona, 38% of the adult population have the condition - but across the border in Mexico, the rate drops down to 7%. The difference between the groups is their life experience - one side displaced, the other on their traditional...

There’s been a lot of attention given to the new antirviral drugs which target Hepatitis C - partly because of the burden of infection of the disease, and the lack of a treatment that can be made easily accessible to around the world, and partly because of the incredible cost of a course of treatment. But a new article on BMJ talks about the...

Patients who are depressed and prescribed antidepressants may report weight gain, but there has been limited research into the association between the two. However new observational research published on bmj.com aims to identify that association. Rafael Gafoor, a psychiatrist and researcher at Kings College London, and one of the authors of that...

Each time you order a test for a child, do you think the population that makes up the baseline against which the results are measured? It turns out that that historically those reference intervals have been based on adults - but children, especially neonates and adolescents, are undergoing physiological changes that mean those reference intervals...

There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment - Ebola’s back, Puerto Rico is without power and the official estimations of death following the hurricane are being challenged. The WHO’s just met to decide what to do about it all, as well as sorting out universal healthcare, access to medicines, eradicating polio, etc etc. To make sense of that...

Series two of The Recommended Dose kicks off with polymath and poet, Dr John Ioannidis. Recognised by The Atlantic as one the most influential scientists alive today, he’s a global authority on genetics, medical research and the nature of scientific inquiry itself – among many other things. A professor at Stanford University, John has authored...

When tackling societal problems - like the opioid epidemic in the US - there are two ways of approaching it. One is to reduce demand - by organising treatment programmes, or reducing the underlying reasons why people may become addicted in the first place - but that’s hard. So governments often turn to the other route - reducing supply - and...

Don Berwick, president emeritus of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In this conversation he discusses how he went from being a paediatrician to running Medicare for Obama, how we can create headroom in stressed systems, and breaking the rules to make things better...

At Evidence Live this year, the focus of the conference was on communication of evidence - both academically, and to the public. And part of that is the role that investigative journalism has to play in that. At the BMJ we’ve used investigative journalistic techniques to try and expose wrong doing on the part of government and industry - always...

Ray Moynihan is a senior research assistant at Bond University, a journalist, champion of rolling back too much medicine, and host of a new series “The Recommended Dose” from Cochrane Australia. In the series, Ray has talked to some of the people who shape the medical evidence that underpin healthcare around the world - the series aim is to...

Getting feedback from people who use NHS services is essential to assessing their value - and improving their quality. Hospitals and general practices widely post information about patient's satisfaction with their services on their websites, but approach tells us little about how feedback changes things on the ground . In this podcast, James...

Doctors and the farming industry are often blamed for overuse of antibiotics that spurs the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance - but the professions are using different methods to combat resistance and reduce overuse. In this roundtable, we bring medics and vets together to discuss the problem - where antibiotic resistance arises, how...

It’s been quite a year for the NHS - it just turned 70, had a winter crisis like never before, got over junior doctor strikes, but then was hit by a series of scandals about breast screening, and now opiate prescriptions. At the same time, we’ve seen demonstrations in favour of the service and even widespread public backing for more money. So...

Mendelian randomisation - it’s a technique that uses the chance distribution of genes in a population, combined with big data sets, to investigate causative relationships. But there are a lot of questions we have in The BMJ about how the technique works - the association between genes and apparently non-biologically mediated behaviours, how much...

15s30m is a social movement to reduce frustration & increase joy - the idea is to spend 15 seconds of your time now, and save someone else 30 minutes down the line. To talk about their movement we're joined by the founders, Rachel Pilling, consultant ophthalmologist, and Dan Wadsworth, transformation manager - both from Bradford Teaching...

Sue Farrington is chair of the Patient Information Forum, a member organisation which promotes best practice in anyone who produces information for patients. In this podcast, she discusses what makes good patient information, why doctors should be pleased when patients arrive at an appointment with a long list of questions, and why patients are...

Dyspareunia is a common but poorly understood problem affecting around 7.5% of sexually active women. It is an important and neglected area of female health, associated with substantial morbidity and distress. Women may be seen by several clinicians before a diagnosis is reached, There are also specialist psychosexual clinics, where men and women...

This week, a very special conversation with a maverick British medico who set up a tiny research centre in Oxford and watched it grow into a global collaboration of over 40,000 people across 130 countries. Three decades on, the Cochrane Collaboration now produces the world's most trusted health evidence that's used by patients, health...

The number of people estimated to be latently infected with TB - that is infected with TB, which has not yet manifested symptoms - is around 2 billion. That is 1 in 3 people on the planet are infected by the bacteria. The World Health Organization’s website notes that on average 5-10% of those infected with TB will develop active TB. That number...