Fighting the brain drain
The World Health Organization's goal to close differences in life expectancy requires equal access to health care, but incentives are needed to get and keep health staff. International cooperation will be essential to strengthen health systems and to manage the migration of health workers from developing to developed countries. But these measures will take time. What can African and Asian health systems do to recruit and retain health workers now?
Dr Nurse will see you
Nurses in the UK are increasingly taking on doctors’ roles in areas such as endoscopy, minor surgery, and anaesthesia, but what is the evidence to underpin nurse to doctor substitution? And is resistance from medical colleagues, the absence of agreed national standards, and a fear of litigation holding nurses back?
See also Head to Head:
Dr Nurse will see you
Nurses in the UK are increasingly taking on doctors’ roles in areas such as endoscopy, minor surgery, and anaesthesia, but what is the evidence to underpin nurse to doctor substitution? And is resistance from medical colleagues, the absence of agreed national standards, and a fear of litigation holding nurses back?
See also Head to Head:
Argus and the cyclops in the clinic
Improving moral vision should be the first step in the teaching of ethics in medicine, for sound skills in reasoning are useless without the moral vision needed to trigger the reasoning process, says Daniel Sokol.
Smoking cessation services for young people
Interventions aimed at young people to help them stop smoking have had only limited success and there is an urgent need for innovative and effective programmes to which young people will subscribe, say principal research fellow Gill M Grimshaw and consultant community paediatrician Alan Stanton.
Consent for publication in difficult cases
Was the BMJ right to reject an ethical debate article because the authors had not obtained the consent of the patient's parents? The article was subsequently published elsewhere. This cluster of articles reflects the issues raised.
Direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs
Are there public health consequences when regulators turn a blind eye to cross border advertising that contravenes national laws, asks this editorial about a controlled longitudinal study. The study assesses the impact of direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs in the United States on Canadian prescribing rates for etanercept, mometasone, and tegaserod, three heavily marketed drugs.
Other recent editorials linked to research papers:
