TheLancet.com - Home Page RT @ruskin147: BBC News - 7 billion people and you: What's your number? possibly the cleverest thing the BBC websit ... Sources: All population data are based on estimates by the UN Population Division and all calculations provided by the UN Population Fund. The remaining data are from other sections of the UN, the Global Footprint Network and the International Telecommunications Union. Want to find out more? Notes on the data: Only birth dates after 1910 can be accommodated and only countries with populations of more than 100,000 people are included. Three country groupings - developed, developing and least developed - featured in the conclusions are those referenced by the UN for assessing the Millennium Development Goals. Read the answers to frequently asked questions here.
Pages: Superscript keyboard shortcut This is a problem that tends to happen a bit too often for my taste. Apple chooses a keyboard shortcut for a command, and the shortcut involves a character key that is not as readily accessible on foreign keyboards as it is on the standard US keyboard, or that’s not even readily accessible in the standard US keyboard layout. Take, for example, the Superscript command in Pages. According to the “” submenu accessible through the “” submenu of the “” menu, the keyboard shorcut is control-command-+. The trouble is that, while “+” is indeed a key on the numeric keypad, it’s not a key on the regular part of the keyboard, either in the US keyboard layout or in my Canadian CSA keyboard layout. In order to type “+“, you have to hit shift-=. So, shouldn’t the keyboard shortcut be described as control-command-shift-= instead? I just don’t understand this. On the other hand, the same thing is not true in Mail. This whole business simply doesn’t make sense.
Evidence Centre — BMJ Group Building evidence into practice Time is the greatest challenge to delivering evidence-based health care; the task of keeping up with emerging guidelines and research can be overwhelming. The BMJ Evidence Centre supports healthcare practitioners and institutions by providing trustworthy information, in formats that recognise the demands and limitations of everyday clinical life. Information that fits Our resources create and package knowledge to fit real clinical workflows. Click to find out more about Best Practice Flexible delivery of authoritative information We have the experience and flexibility to help you to communicate evidence-based information to your target audience. Click to find out more about our EBM consultancy services A range of tools and services to help you harness the power of evidence The BMJ Evidence Centre’s clinical information specialists find, filter, appraise and summarise the best available research evidence. Click to find out more about our process Find out more
ACP - Medical Oncologists RT @trished: "I need permission to give a drug to half my patients, but not to give it to them all", but MRHA is making that easier http ... Rosalind L Smyth, Brough professor of paediatric medicine Author Affiliations r.l.smyth@liv.ac.uk The research community needs to support a new initiative to reduce the regulatory burden Over the past three to five years, there has been a barrage of criticism and dissent about the complex and bureaucratic systems that govern clinical research in the United Kingdom. One such initiative is the implementation, since April 2011, by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) of a risk adapted approach to the regulation of clinical trials of investigational medicinal products.3 This approach defines three types of trial according to the risks associated with the product—none (A), some (B), and markedly higher (C) than for standard medical care.
Efficient feedback of clinical outcomes: Background As a trainee in the hospital the best role models i saw had a proactive approach of following up the cases they were involved with. I believe in part this made them the high quality clinicians they had become. Knowing the final outcome in cases you were directly involved, is the basis of one of the Work Place Based Assessment tools(WPBA) the Case based Discussion (CBD). For me reflecting on an interesting case and discussing this with a senior has been an enriching way of learning. Politically, the NHS Outcomes Framework has shifted the focus to end results rather than processes. The 'inbetween' stuff which is useful but not significant we dont seem to capture and feedback to fine tune our expertise. I have heard paramedics really curious about pts they treated for a CVA, A+E doctors curious but time poor of knowing what happened to their referrals and GPs like myself wanting to know the outcomes from my actions after referring a pt to hospital in or out of hours.
The Lancet Oncology : Volume 12, Number 9, 1 September 2011 Challenges to effective cancer control in China, India, and Russia Paul E Goss, Kathrin Strasser-Weippl, Brittany L Lee-Bychkovsky, Lei Fan, Junjie Li, Yanin Chavarri-Guerra, Pedro E R Liedke, C S Pramesh, Tanja Badovinac-Crnjevic, Yuri Sheikine, Zhu Chen, You-lin Qiao, Zhiming Shao, Yi-Long Wu, Daiming Fan, Louis W C Chow, Jun Wang, Qiong Zhang, Shiying Yu, Gordon Shen, Jie He, Arnie Purushotham, Richard Sullivan, Rajendra Badwe, Shripad D Banavali, Reena Nair, Lalit Kumar, Purvish Parikh, Somasundarum Subramanian, Pankaj Chaturvedi, Subramania Iyer, Surendra Srinivas Shastri, Raghunadhrao Digumarti, Enrique Soto-Perez-de-Celis, Dauren Adilbay, Vladimir Semiglazov, Sergey Orlov, Dilyara Kaidarova, Ilya Tsimafeyeu, Sergei Tatishchev, Kirill D Danishevskiy, Marc Hurlbert, Caroline Vail, Jessica St Louis, Arlene Chan Cancer is one of the major non-communicable diseases posing a threat to world health.
RT @mellojonny: @RoyLilley @clarercgp What is the role of a GP today? My thoughts from the frontline Brief notes before the Battle of Ideas 2011 debate, Radical surgery for the NHS: what is a GP’s role today? The answer depends on who is defining the role. The answer (as always) should not come from GPs, (or those pesky meddlers the Kings Fund, or the Dept of Health) but patients. And not the pushy, entitled, ‘fix my sore throat before I interview Sir David’ journalists, that cannot understand why GPs don’t keep the same opening hours as Tescos (do they think Tescos could afford 24hour opening if it took 10 years of training to operate a checkout?) Nor the people who run think-tanks who write long papers about what they would want from a GP if they were a patient, only they’re not actually chronically sick or worried half to death that they might be; these are healthy people, not patients. Studies have shown that at the start of medical school, GPs are in fact normal people, capable of blending in at any social occasion. The commonest question my patients ask me is, “Will you be my doctor?”
Taking Note: What Makes the Mayo Clinic Different? Patients Trump Research “At Mayo the focus is on the patient. The needs of the patient come first. “At most academic medical centers,” he continues, “medical research comes first; education of the students comes second. This isn’t to say that doctors at Columbia don’t strive to give patients the very best care possible. But, at Columbia, “while being an excellent clinician is great, it’s just not as highly regarded as being a brilliant researcher,” Patterson explains. I have heard the same story from other doctors at some of the nation’s top academic medical centers. At Mayo, on the other hand, stardom is frowned up. An Egalitarian Culture You may have heard that at Mayo, doctors collaborate. “It doesn’t matter how much revenue you bring in,” Patterson explains, “or how many procedures you do. At Columbia, by contrast, the pecking order is quite clear: even the furniture on the floor where a physician works tells him where he stands. Mayo is the outlier. “Turnover is very low.
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Pharma & Fun, Not Oxymoronic? Here Comes Gamification! Speaking of Boehringer Ingelheim's (BI's) long-awaited -- but not yet available -- Facebook game, Syrum, John Pugh, head of BI online communications, said it's about "pharma and fun.” He quickly added “This is not an oxymoron. You can have the two in the same sentence.” The objective of the game is to "save the world, one disease at a time, by harvesting molecules (a little like Farmville) and then using them as trading cards to play against diseases (a little like Pokemon). A player must first investigate molecular compounds at a research desk before putting them to the test in the laboratory, then conduct clinical trials and, if successful, advance a treatment to market" (see the MM&M review here). BI's objective is to create a "kick-ass game," says Pugh. I can't wait to try out the game and get to the last level, which I presume is "marketing." Is this game -- or any other game dreamed up by pharma marketers/PR people -- really "kick-ass?" Looks a bit nerdy.
The Stealth Marketing of Medical Devices: The Biotronik Example We have frequently discussed the use of organized, deceptive stealth marketing campaigns to influence physicians to prescribe pharmaceuticals. Now more information is coming to light about similar campaigns to influence physicians to use particular medical devices As reported in the New York Times, based on documents supplied apparently by a corporate whistleblower, here are some tactics used by a small German device manufacturer, Biotronik: Seeding Trials These are ostensibly clinical trials, but designed more to market than to discover meaningful data. The message from cardiologists was loud and clear, according to a top executive at a heart device company. Influencing Device Choice by Making Referring Doctors Consultants The Times report stated that the company's recent increase in sales was due to the company’s success in developing relationships with doctors who, in turn, can influence which brand of device a patient gets. Here is an example of one type of such a relationship: Also,