Dear Editor, General Practitioners Specialising in Substance Abuse (GPSSAs) met in Cherry Orchard Hospital on Tuesday, December 2. GPSSAs at the meeting expressed concern that a pay increase of 15 per cent, which they were assured would be implemented from September 2008, was now being deferred indefinitely. GPSSAs had fared very poorly under the last [...]
Dear Editor, Isn’t it strange that the Minister of Health wants to talk to ‘the doctors’ about drugs savings when a scheme (the Indicative Drugs Savings Scheme), which was set up to do this was, for some inexplicable reason, abandoned by her a couple of years ago. This scheme created an awareness of drug costs [...]
Dear Editor, This morning I was asked by a patient, whose daughter was with her to have a Gardasil vaccination, why she could not claim a refund from her insurance with Hibernian Health, previously known as Vivas. She said that Hibernian offered a partial refund, but only with some providers, and asked why our practice [...]
Ed Madden, BL, on a case in which a woman who worked at a turkey farm alleged that she had been infected by the campylobacter bacterium due to a breach of duty by her employer. Mr and Mrs Sanderson ran a farm at Hutton near Preston in England. Sadly, Mr Sanderson has since died. In [...]
The current collapse in the financial world is causing great concern to the monied and political classes and is beginning to adversely affect the lives of ordinary people. Unfortunately, this is not the first time society has seen financial Armageddon. In our own time, we have seen the demise of the Tiger economies of South [...]
Dr Garrett FitzGerald writes that the powers that be have made a pig’s ear of telling the nation about dioxins in Irish pork, ruining our turkey-and-ham dinner well in advance of Christmas. It’s bad news for pigs as well. They can’t win. A small percentage of their numbers were caught at the trough, wiring into [...]
A new telemedicine project being piloted in NHS Lothian, Scotland, has the potential to reduce the number of inpatient hospital admissions in the area. The NHS in Lothian, Scotland, has embarked on a new telemedicine pilot project involving a remote patient monitoring system, which may have the potential to reduce the number of inpatient hospital [...]
Dr Mick Molloy hopes that despite all the bad-news headlines in the newspapers, children will still get to enjoy the magic of Santa Claus this year. Christmas is fast approaching and all the signs are telling us how many shopping days are left. The bad-news stories keep flooding in though, which is not a good [...]
Mike Power examines the reasons why society holds doctors in such high esteem and why patients place their lives in the hands of physicians. “The treatment is really a co-operative of a trinity — the patient, the doctor and the inner doctor.” — Ralph Bircher In this part of the ‘Anatomy’ series, we will detour [...]
The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) in the UK has just approved its ‘Guidance for the Nursing Care of Older People’ – and when it is published next year, nurses will be told they should not call patients ‘love’ or ‘dearie’. To improve patient care, older people should be treated ‘courteously and respectfully’ and be [...]
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