Medicine and Science from The BMJ

Women and the Zika Virus

Interviews from the Women deliver conference in Copenhagen.
Donna McCarraher, director of reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health at FHI 360, explains why women should be at the centre of efforts to mitigate the effect of Zika Virus in Brazil.

Abortion as a development issue

Interviews from the Women deliver conference in Copenhagen.
Catrin Schulte-Hillen, co-ordinator of reproductive health and sexual violence care at Medecins Sans Frontieres, explains why the development community shouldn't conflate sexual violence and access to abortion.

What are they on?

This week, we look at medication reconciliation.
Joshua Pevnick, health services researcher and hospital physician at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, LA, US, talks us through what it is and why it can be so hard to get right.
And Emma Iddles, a junior doctor in general surgery at Hairmyres Hospital, Lanarkshire, UK, explains how her project improved medicines reconciliation in the surgical admissions unit of the hospital.
For more, read Joshua's full paper, http://goo.gl/O59BWo, and Emma's project write up http://goo.gl/znrNGQ.

The Weekend Effect - what’s (un)knowable, and what next?

We do we know about the weekend effect? As Martin McKee puts it in an editorial on thebmj.com, "almost nothing is clear in this tangled tale"
In this roundtable, Navjoyt Ladher, Analysis editor for The BMJ is joined by some of the key academics who have published research and commented on the weekend effect to make sense of what we know and don’t know about weekend care in hospitals.
http://www.bmj.com/weekend
Taking part in the discussion are:
Cassie Aldridge, HiSLAC study project manager at the University of Birmingham
Rachel Meacock, research fellow in health economics at Manchester University
Nick Black, professor of health services research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Paul Aylin, professor of epidemiology and public health at Imperial College London
Nick Freemantle, professor of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics at University College London
Peter Rothwell, professor of neurology at the University of Oxford

”Women deliver, and not only babies”

Katja Iversen, CEO of Women Deliver, joins Rebecca Coombes to explain why the UN sustainable development goals are unachievable if we don't empower women and girls to take control of their health, wellbeing, and reproductive rights.
http://womendeliver.org/

Travellers’ diarrhoea

Travellers’ diarrhoea is one of the most common illnesses in people who travel internationally, and depending on destination affects 20-60% of the more than 800 million travellers each year. In most cases the diarrhoea occurs in people who travel to areas with poor food and water hygiene.
Mike Brown, consultant in infectious diseases and tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, explains the approach to the prevention and treatment of diarrhoea in travellers.
Read the full review:
http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1937

”The information we get can be harmfull”; Informed consent is not a panacea

Providing information to enable informed choices about healthcare sounds immediately appealing to most of us.
But Minna Johansson, GP trainee and PhD student at the University of Gothenburg, argues that preventive medicine and expanding disease definitions have changed the ethical premises of informed choice and our good intentions may inadvertently advance overmedicalisation.
Read the full analysis:
http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2230

The science of improvement

Or, the one where Fiona Moss and Don Berwick tells us what they think quality improvement is.
Fiona Moss is dean, Royal Society of Medicine, and Don Berwick is president emeritus and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Don's talk and the interview with Fiona were both recorded at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, Gothenburg, April 2016. Watch out for the extended versions of these recordings, up next Friday.

Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US

Medical error is not included on death certificates or in rankings of cause of death. Martin Makary, professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, joins us to explain why we don't measure medical error, and why it is so important that we start.
Read the full analysis:
http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139

Ecigarettes; ”...the risk is 5% of that caused by smoking”

Nicholas Hopkinson, reader in respiratory medicine at Imperial College London, joins us to explain why a new report from the Royal College of Physicians supports the role of electronic cigarettes as part of a comprehensive tobacco control strategy.
Read the full analysis:
http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1745