A reflection on human attention and patient safety At the October 2025 American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) meeting Dr Joyce Wahr delivered the prestigious John W. Severinghaus Lecture with a message for all of healthcare: most errors are not the result of carelessness, incompetence or insufficient effort. They are predictable outcomes of how the human …
It’s not your fault! The cognitive basis of medical error Read More »
More than 25 years after the modern “quality movement” took off, healthcare is still not as safe as we want it to be. Checklists, protocols and investigations have helped, but improvement has slowed while care has become more complex. Medical teams work in settings where conditions often shift rapidly, the margin for error is slim, …
Basketball, rugby, football and Ted Lasso: lessons from sport for safety in healthcare Read More »
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) capture how people experience illness, treatment and day-to-day health. As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, generative AI tools offer new ways of gathering and interpreting this information. A recent paper (Boyer et al, npj Digital Medicine. 2025) highlights both the limitations of current approaches and the possible contribution of AI. These ideas are …
Rethinking Patient-Reported Outcomes in the age of generative AI Read More »
I use a wearable continuous blood pressure monitor, a device likely to transform hypertension diagnosis and treatment. My broker urged me to do the annual “Discovery Wellness Experience”, which offers “Diamond Status”, hence rewards – coffee! It didn’t feel like a Wellness Experience when the Discovery person reported my blood pressure (see below) as 143/81, …
How and why I continuously check my blood pressure Read More »
During the Covid-19 pandemic, public health and infectious disease authorities struggled to grasp, communicate and act on current evidence about how the SARS-COV-2 virus spreads. These shortcomings resulted in misguided policies and insufficient protection measures, contributing to 15 million potentially preventable deaths worldwide. With ongoing threats like tuberculosis (TB) – South Africa’s leading cause of …
Introduction Despite being underfunded for over a decade, and now in “critical condition”, the UK’s National Health System (NHS) has significantly invested in personalised medicine. These initiatives include the pioneering 100,000 Genomes Project, genetically based cancer screening, and personalised prevention. Proponents argue these programmes will improve outcomes and reduce pressure on the healthcare system. Critics …
Personalised prevention: fattening the cow or just weighing it? Read More »
Clinicians thrive on solving their patients’ health problems The responsibilities of medical practice can be heavy, but despite the challenges and complexities, or perhaps because of them, clinicians generally find clinical work rewarding. High levels of workplace frustration and burnout currently reported in multiple countries and settings are not intrinsic to the clinical aspects of …
Operational failures in primary care: AI solutions? Read More »
Our online health professionals discussion group includes clinicians who use dietary interventions to change the course of type 2 diabetes. One of them described two patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and his approach to their treatment, raising a couple of interesting questions: – Can a low-carb diet help with type 1 diabetes? – …
Type 1 Diabetes: Can a low carb diet cure it? Does immunisation cause it? Read More »
In the journal NEJM AI, Peter Szolovits, a computer scientist and medical decision-making expert, describes generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models as having “miraculous abilities” but points out that “science abhors miracles” and concludes that these models aren’t ready for clinical use. [Miracle: “an extraordinary and welcome event not explicable by natural or scientific laws and …
AI and Large Language Models – Divine or Platonic? Read More »
In 1954, Henry Beecher, the pioneering American anaesthesiologist, described death from anaesthesia as a “public health problem“. Seventy years later, thanks to concerted effort and innovation, anaesthesia is about 100 times safer, occurring in about 1 in 100,000 cases. This makes surgery safer and contributes to its popularity and effectiveness: globally, over 313 million surgical …
Death after surgery is the third biggest cause of mortality and a Public Health problem Read More »
