Dr Mark Hannon says that the arguments for retaining the endocrinology/diabetes speciality in Cork University Hospital make sense for many good reasons. It is with a light heart that I type this, my first article in quite a while, as my recent break has left me refreshed and replete with new things about which to [...]
Dr Mick Molloy says that in today’s economic climate, it makes sense that the beneficiaries of third-level education should pay for it August 2008 was the wettest on record since records began, apparently, and many students who finished their Leaving Certificate this year will be glad they took the chance of a foreign holiday to [...]
Ed Madden, BL, on a recent case in which a doctor appealed a UK Fitness to Practice Committee decision that investigative journalists who were conducting an enquiry into his internet practice should be regarded as patients. In or about 2000, Dr Julian Eden set up an internet medical website called ‘e-med’. The original purpose of [...]
The death of Dr Michael De Bakey on 11 July 2008 has brought to an end almost a century of tireless work for the improvement of surgical treatment of major cardio-vascular disorders. I had the privilege of working with him for six months in the Methodist Hospital, Houston in 1970; an unforgettable experience. On first [...]
Has patient-led decison-making gone too far? Dr John Ryan writes from America on the growing problem of obesity and the right time to involve patients in decisons about their health. At ten o’clock last Saturday night I was out for dinner sitting on a street corner. There was a TV on behind the bar and [...]
Dear Editor, I read recently that almost 20 per cent of patients don’t show up for hospital appointments. The estimated cost of this process is €7 million. This is astonishing! As a practising vasectomist, for 20 years we have got a booking deposit, or a refundable fee in the case of GMS patients, on booking. [...]
Terence Cosgrave writes that GPs’ judgments on Minister Harney and Prof Drumm will matter little in the real world. If the results of the Irish Medical Times’ survey of general practitioners were actual medical results that had come back from an actual lab, we’d all be adopting that concerned, empathetic face that is needed when [...]
Dear Sir, The Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, announced on August 5, 2008, that she has asked the HSE to prepare and submit a plan for the introduction of a human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination plan for 12-year-old girls to start in September 2009. A similar (but compulsory) proposal was made here in [...]
Dear Editor, The cited reports (IMT, 15-22 August, www.imt.ie/news/2008/08/commission_says_no_to_safety_a.html) appear to be about patient safety in the medical realm only. But the source of patient safety could be due to management not employing secretaries to write reports, no social workers, no psychologists for counselling people, no theatre time to carry out operations and no proper [...]
Rory Hafford looks at the best ways to handle difficult patients and the subtle differences of communication. Medicine. Made up of the brightest and the best. Highly prepared professionals, carefully coached in the art of clinical diagnosis to an extraordinary degree. Trained to spot the subtle differences between a hiatus hernia and a bout of [...]
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