Medical Centre

NHS budgets are under considerable pressure. It is therefore unsurprising that many NHS Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) In England will aim to prioritise price in contract awards, But this approach is a significant threat to community-centred healthcare. While competitive tendering is a legally required, an excessive focus on costs in awarding NHS contracts risks overshadowing key factors such as established community trust, local expertise, and the long-term impact on continuity of care. This shift towards cheaper, often external, commercial providers threatens to cut the links between communities and their local health services. The argument that competitive tendering is solely about legal compliance, and not cost, is undermined by the very nature of such tendering, which by design encourages the lowest bid. This approach risks eroding the social fabric of local healthcare provision, where established relationships and understanding of specific community needs are essential. Establishe...

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are essential in clinical and public health research, ensuring discoveries and interventions benefit all sections of society; and enhancing the quality, relevance, and impact of research. Ensuring that diverse populations are represented appropriately within research is a scientific necessity. By embedding DEI principles into research design and execution, researchers can generate findings that are broadly applicable across the population while also addressing long-standing health disparities. DEI is needed in clinical and public health research because it improves the generalisability and relevance of research findings. Research outcomes must apply to the diverse populations they are intended to serve. By including participants from different racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, and geographic backgrounds, studies can avoid biases that result from the narrower recruitment into research studies we often saw in the past. Without such diversity, r...

In recent days, there has been discussion about the "overheads" or "indirect" costs that universities add on to the cost of research projects. This has been driven by a decision by the US government to reduce the indirect costs of research on grants awarded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) from the current 60% to 15%. Comments from people such as Elon Musk has suggested these costs are wasteful and can therefore be easily cut from research grants. In this blog, I make the case for retaining a fair amount of indirect costs on research grants. Without the indirect costs that universities receive on government research grants, universities would struggle to provide the essential support and infrastructure required for high-quality research to take place. While direct research costs (such as staff salaries, laboratory equipment, travel and consumables) are essential, they are only part of the funding needed. Research relies heavily on a wide array of indire...

Effective management of hospital resources was a critical component of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With fluctuating waves of infection and emerging virus variants, accurately predicting the demand for hospital beds has proven to be a complex but essential task. Our recent study, led by Derryn Lovett and published in BMJ Health Care Informatics , evaluates a pragmatic approach to forecasting COVID-19-positive hospital bed occupancy using simple, accessible methods.  Why Predicting Bed Occupancy Matters During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems around the world faced unprecedented challenges, with surges in demand for acute care beds due to severe cases of the virus. The ability to predict future bed occupancy is vital for several reasons: Resource allocation: Effective forecasting helps healthcare leaders plan staffing, equipment needs, and additional capacity. Crisis management: Accurate predictions enable health systems to anticipate surges and manage ove...