Trevor Jackson

When balance is bias

Sometimes the science is strong enough for the media to come down on one side of a debate

Blunders will never ceaseHow the media report medical errorsA risky business

# How the media report medical errors {#article-title-2} On the front page of Londons Evening Standard of 14 February the face of 3 year old Najiyah Hussain, beside the headline “She was killed by a hospital,” looks the epitome of wronged innocence. The papers principal focus is the human tragedy of Najiyah and of her family. There has been little time, and little space, for analysis. But we are told: “Police are investigating the incident and a doctor has been suspended.” The facts seem obvious. Najiyah, “given laughing gas instead of oxygen,” was the victim of a mistake that you would not expect could happen in a modern health service. A victim, just like Wayne Jowett, who died on 2 February, a month after vincristine was injected into his spine instead of a vein at Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham. And just like the 74 year old man who died at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton, after the wrong drug was administered during surgery on 7 February. Yet mistakes of the kind that led to such deaths are not as …

Press: Both sides now

In the quest for balanced reporting on issues such as MMR, journalists may be misleading the public There has long been a tendency to blame the mass media, particularly tabloid newspapers, for public attitudes to and understanding of matters of scientific controversy, such as the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. But how far do newspapers, and television and radio news, affect what people believe and know? Researchers at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies have been asking more than a thousand people what they think and know about MMR, human and animal …

Mental health: a worthwhile goal

When the United Nations comes to choose its new set of sustainable development goals, it should be sure to include mental health, argue Graham Thornicroft and Vikram Patel in The BMJ this week (doi:10.1136/bmj.g5189). They set out a range of reasons for why the case is compelling. First among these is that “poorer mental health is a precursor to reduced resilience to conflict.” Not only that, but conflict is itself a risk factor for adverse mental health, they add, and in the aftermath of war people with mental illness are often accorded the lowest priority. At a time when some of the most seemingly intractable conflicts continue to wreck and destroy lives—in Syria …

The regulation revolution: the future is here

What do patients, the public, and employers expect from doctors? Who should set the professional standards? And how should we judge whether doctors are meeting those standards? The fact that questions such as these get asked so often shows how much things have changed since the days when regulation was run by doctors for doctors and when most doctors were left alone from the day they qualified to the day they retired, as Kieran Walshe and Julian Archer say in The BMJ this week ( BMJ 2014;349:g5744, doi:10.1136/bmj.g5744). Instead we are moving to a world in which “state sponsored regulation is run by key stakeholders—including employers, the public, and the profession—and is …

Patient powered health

“Today the website Mumsnet is the source of all information on pregnancy and beyond,” writes long serving BMJ columnist James Owen Drife, in a wry take on what it feels like for an emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynaecology to become a grandfather (doi:10.1136/bmj.f2214). “Phone calls to an obstetric parent are for quality control purposes only,” he adds. Drife’s lighthearted comments about the power of an online network such as Mumsnet echo those of this week’s BMJ essayist, Dave deBronkart (doi:10.1136/bmj.f1990). It was through contact with other net savvy patients that deBronkart went from a cancer diagnosis to becoming an international patient …

Time to divide the spoils

You could be forgiven for thinking that it is open season on the NHS. Over the past few months, the media image has been of a service sick to its core, almost unrivalled in its incompetence and cruelty. From Mid Staffs to Morecambe Bay, from the “crisis” in emergency departments to the Liverpool care pathway, some egregious failings have certainly been on display. The BMJ would have been remiss if it had not sought to document and interpret these. In their editorial (doi:10.1136/bmj.f4343), J Nicholl and S Mason seek to get beyond the “corridors of shame” headlines to the …

How science is going sour on sugar

When the British physiologist John Yudkin published Pure, White and Deadly —his 1972 book linking heart disease to sugar consumption—he met strong opposition from the sugar industry. As Geoff Watts writes in this week’s BMJ (doi:10.1136/bmj.e7800), “jobs and research grants that might predictably have come Yudkin’s way did not materialise.” Attacks also included the abrupt cancellation of conferences suspected of promulgating anti-sugar findings, and the book was dismissed as a work of fiction. Enter fat in the role of chief culprit in the rise in heart disease. The fat hypothesis, the chief proponent of which was the American biologist Ancel Keys, influenced policy makers and captured the popular imagination. …

The NHS in the age of anxiety

This year is shaping up to be the NHS’s annus horribilis. Sixty five years since it began, the service has been subject to a constant drip of bad news—from Robert Francis’s report into what went wrong at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, to the so called crisis in emergency departments. Yet in his essay this week, Rudolf Klein tells us that statistically, there does not seem to be much wrong with the NHS (doi:10.1136/bmj.f5104). Key performance targets have been maintained in the face of fiscal austerity, hospital infection rates have improved, and the service seemed to be making good progress in hitting its savings targets. And …

The fallout from Francis

Inevitably, coverage of the Francis report into failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust dominated the UK media for several days after its publication last week. Even though we had heard the catalogue of cruelty and neglect before, it still had the power to shock. In this week’s Analysis article (doi:10.1136/bmj.f801), Richard Leach and colleagues show that poor hydration and nutrition are not just a problem in outliers such as Mid Staffs; they are an issue right across the NHS, particularly in the community, where most older people receive their care. One …