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December 2025

Constitutions don’t pump water: why healthcare needs a water strategy

Leave a Comment / Environment, Public health / By

Lessons from the global leader in water management South Africa’s Constitution guarantees the right to sufficient water. Water is recognised as a condition of dignity, health, and citizenship, and the state is obliged to take reasonable measures to realise that right. Constitutions do not pump water. When water systems fail, consequences for healthcare are immediate. Maternity …

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Plausibility is not proof: what two studies reveal about trust in clinical research

Leave a Comment / Artificial Intelligence, Anesthesiology / By

Intraoperative EEG-guided depth of anaesthesia monitoring may reduce postoperative complications such as delirium, but the evidence is mixed. This uncertainty is a useful lens for seeing how clinical evidence is produced, evaluated and trusted. A brief report We examined the association between intraoperative EEG-based depth of anaesthesia (DoA) guidance and postoperative delirium in a retrospective …

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AI, improvement, and what it means to know

Leave a Comment / Artificial Intelligence / By

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a set of technologies that will profoundly impact healthcare in all dimensions of quality. At times, however, the AI industry and the community of healthcare quality specialists talk past each other. This is because they operate with different epistemologies – the term for descriptions about what we treat as knowledge, how …

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The paradox of precision medicine: does disease disappear?

Leave a Comment / Precision medicine / By

Diagnosis is an act of naming: the point at which we are told what kind of health problem we’re dealing with. With a successful diagnosis, uncertainty ends, explanation is offered and appropriate treatment can start. From a biological point of view, however, diagnosis arrives late. By the time a condition like type 2 diabetes is …

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Alchemy, chemistry, and the mystery of “Albert”

Leave a Comment / Artificial Intelligence, Technology / By

Albert Invent is a new software platform for chemists and materials scientists  – the people who combine substances in the lab to make products for the modern world. The company doesn’t disclose who or what it is named after. Albert Einstein seems the reasonable guess. But an even better fit is someone further back in …

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WhatsApp is part of healthcare: how can it be used safely and reliably?

Leave a Comment / Technology, Artificial Intelligence / By

It’s common for private doctors in Mexico City, and across Latin America, to wake up each morning and be greeted by 100 or more WhatsApp messages. The messages typically contain urgent clinical concerns mixed with routine administrative requests. Often, no clinical record is available at the point of review to help the practitioner deal safely …

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Prioritising women’s health

Leave a Comment / Health economics, Outcomes, Women's Health / By

Burden and prevalence, life-course impact, research and investment priorities Many people say women’s health is underfunded. This is often framed in moral or political terms linked to patriarchy, historical exclusion or bias within medicine. These forces are real and well documented. But if the goal is to understand how health priorities are actually set, they …

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Machine psychology and AI as a diagnostician

Leave a Comment / Artificial Intelligence, Quality, Safety / By

Diagnosis is a classification task: a patient has symptoms, the symptoms map to a list of possible conditions, the clinician selects the best label. This is an appealingly simple way to define how medicine works and in many cases, it’s good enough. In others, quite inadequate. Diagnosis can be straightforward – when the patient presents …

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Three neighbours, three paths to Quality

Leave a Comment / Quality / By

Insights from Scandinavia for better, safer hospitals External inspection for quality seems straightforward: set standards, assess hospitals against them, then performance should improve. But three Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – show a divergence of philosophies and practices behind that idea. Norway’s DNV model applies systems-oriented, ISO-based accreditation internationally. Denmark ended its national …

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