Medicine and Science from The BMJ

Creating support for doctors in the NHS

The NHS Practitioner Health Programme - once only for doctors in London, now it’s being rolled out across the NHS to provide the largest, publicly funded, comprehensive physician health service, in the world.
However, while helping the individual is essential, systemic change needs to be made to support doctors in our healthcare system.
Clare Gerada, GP and medical director of NHS PHP joins us to talk about how the expanded service will work, and what role regulation and inspections should play in wellbeing.
For more on the NHS PHP
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2019/10/31/clare-gerada-protecting-practitioners-health/
020 3049 4505
https://php.nhs.uk/

Nudging the calories off your order

There has been a lot of noise made about calorie counts on labels - the idea being it’s one of those things that might nudge people to make healthier choices.
So much so that in 2018, in the USA, it became mandatory for food chains with more than 20 outlets to label the calories in their food.
But the effectiveness of that is hard to gauge - it’s relied on reporting from customers, which leads to an incomplete picture. The really killer data would be from the chains themselves, but they’re reluctant to share that widely.
That's where new research comes in - and we're joined in the podcast by Joshua Petimar, postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Jason Block, associate professor at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute & Harvard Medical School, to discuss what they've done.
Read the full research:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5837

Testing for TB is only skin deep

A TB infection can take two forms, active and latent. Active disease is transmissible, and causes the damage to the lungs which makes TB one of the biggest killers in the world.
In the latent form, the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis is quiescent and can stay that way for years until it becomes active and causes those clinical signs.
Testing for the active version of the disease is done directly, but when it comes to latency, we use the tuberculin skin test to see if someone has an immunological response - and when that happens we consider them to have latent disease.
However, in this podcast Lalita Ramakrishnan, professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Cambridge; Paul Edelstein, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; and Marcel Behr, professor of medicine at McGill University question that conclusion.
Read their full analysis:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5770/
Their previous analysis:
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2738.abstract
And search for their previous podcast - "Have we misunderstood TB's timeline?"

20 Arnav Agarwal

This week, Dr Arnav Agarwal joins Ray to share the perspective and experiences of a young, recently graduated doctor working in a busy, metropolitan hospital. Despite the long shifts and demanding environment, Arnav makes time and space to reflect on work, life and mortality through his thought-provoking poetry and volunteer work.

19 Marion Nestle

This week, Ray ventures into the notoriously complex field of nutrition with special guest, Professor Marion Nestle. Named by Forbes as one of the world's most powerful foodies, Marion’s stellar career spans five decades of research, teaching, advocacy work and the publication of countless prize-winning books.

Statins for primary prevention - How good is the evidence

Statins are now the most commonly used drug in the UK and one of the most commonly used medicines in the world, but debate remains about their use for primary prevention for people without cardiovascular disease.
Paula Byrne from the National University of Ireland Galway, joins us to talk about the evidence of benefit for low risk individuals, and what needs to be done to finally answer the questions about efficacy and harms.
Read the full analysis:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5674

Ancestry DNA tests can over or under estimate genetic disease risk

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests are sold online and in shops as a way to “find out what your DNA says".
They insights into ancestry or disease risks; others claim to provide information on personality, athletic ability, and child talent. However, interpretation of genetic data is complex and context dependent, and DTC genetic tests may produce false positive and false negative results.
Rachel Horton, clinical training fellow, Anneke Lucassen, chair of British Society of Genetic Medicine, and Jude Hayward the RCGP clinical champion for genomics join us to discuss how this deluge of genetic data is affecting patients, GPs and clinical geneticists in the NHS.
Read the full article:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5688

How Blockchain could improve clinical trial transparency

Blockchain is the digital technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, and has been proposed as the digital panacea of our times.
But Leeza Osipenko, from the London School of Economics, has thought about how it could actually be used in clinical trials, and what else would need to change in our regulatory environment to make that work.
Read her full essay:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5561

A new way to look at behaviour change in UK GPs

In quality improvement, measurement is seen as a key driver of change - how well do you know you’re doing, if you can’t actually measure it.
So, when something changes in the NHS (say a new guideline) how can you tell how quickly that’s filtering down to the front line.
Ben goldacre, from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, joins us to talk about a new proof of concept published on bmj.com, which uses NHS prescribing data to analyse how change propagated through GP practices.
Read the full open access research:
https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l5205
https://openprescribing.net/

17 Liam Mannix

Our latest series kicks off with Australia’s multi-award-winning health and science reporter, Liam Mannix. He joins Ray to share his insights into the role and impact of evidence, advocacy and investigative reporting in today’s ever-changing media landscape.