The UK and Europe are facing a serious lab skills shortage over the next decade with medical laboratories among the worst affected. An ageing population and skilled operators retiring without being replaced by a new generation of lab technicians is at the core of a critical lack of skilled lab workers, with it taking 5-10 years for a technician to become fully competent and an expert in their…
France has 32 hospital groups – two regional hospital groups (CRH) and 30 CHUs. Ranked among the 10 best hospitals in France, The Rennes University Hospital (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire [CHU] de Rennes) employs 7,700 people (the second largest employer in the region) and processes almost 1,500 hospitalisations every day. Untypically, since 2015 the general director has been female:…
Staff shortages are among the most urgent healthcare problems. While digitisation might offer relief, unfortunately many hospitals lag behind in transforming their processes. As pressure mounts, the chorus is heard: ‘It’s high time for bold changes’. Indeed, this was the motto of the 2019 Western German Health Congress held in Cologne, an event that focuses on health policy and health…
Currently many researchers and experts assume that the next great socio-economic revolution will include a completely new definition of health and how we define illnesses and therapies. “Our health system today can no longer be sustained in its existing form. It has become too expensive and too ineffective,” Professor Harald Schmidt, head of the Department of Pharmacology and Personalised…
Longer hours, more demanding working practices, complex cases and increased administration are taking their toll on physicians as growing numbers, across a range of specialties, report signs of burnout. All this despite technological advances such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to aid diagnosis, read and interpret images, improve workflow and enhance decision-making. Recognised…
Burnout in doctors has devastating consequences on the quality of care they deliver, according to a large-scale systematic review and meta-analysis. The study, by experts at the Universities of Manchester, Keele, Leeds, Birmingham and Westminster, looks at 47 papers which together analyse the responses of 43,000 doctors. It finds that doctors with burnout are twice as likely to make mistakes,…
Emergency radiology is no longer a babbling field; professionalisation will bring more recognition to this young subspecialty, according to Elizabeth Dick, a London-based consultant, who will coordinate part of the new European Diploma in Emergency Radiology (EDER), the European Society of Radiology’s new tool. We interviewed the radiologist, who spoke of her daily practice and why she loves…
New words are consistently spun out in the USA and frequently assimilated into ‘American English’. Take the term ‘hospitalist’ (little used in European English), which was coined by the renowned academic physician Robert M Wachter (University of California, San Francisco) and his colleague Lee Goldman, in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996. Lisa Chamoff…
Hygiene is still a leading topic in endoscopy, and education remains crucial in Europe, according to Ulrike Beilenhoff, scientific secretary of the European Society of Gastroenterology and Endoscopy Nurses and Associates (ESGENA). The two subjects took centre stage during the 21st ESGENA Conference, held during UEG Week in Barcelona this October. With around 600 participants, lectures, posters,…
Radiographers are increasingly central to patient care, but the heterogeneous education and skills across Europe remain challenging. Dr Jonathan McNulty and Håkon Hjemly, of the European Federation of Radiographers Societies (EFRS), explained how they plan to improve radiographers’ visibility and work towards homogenising training across Europe, notably by launching a European Diploma in…
Patients’ unfavourable views of hospital care in England are strongly linked to insufficient numbers of nurses on duty, rather than uncaring staff, indicates observational research published in the online journal BMJ Open. Increasing the registered nurse headcount may boost satisfaction with the quality of care, conclude the researchers, who base their findings on national survey data from…
Fueled by physician staffing shortages and shifting employment patterns, temporary substitute physicians, so-called “locum tenens” physicians, become a regular sight in the medical field. But do they provide the same level of care as the doctors they are filling in for? The answer appears to be “yes,” at least when it comes to death rates in the month following treatment, according to…
People sometimes joke that easy tasks are “not brain surgery.” But what happens when it actually is brain surgery? How old is too old to be a neurosurgeon? In a new Mayo Clinic Proceedings study, most neurosurgeons disagreed with an absolute age cutoff, but half favored additional testing for neurosurgeons 65 and older. Some professions, including commercial pilots, FBI agents and air traffic…
Leading clinicians, scientists, academics and crossbench peers have urged a radical rethink of the approach to health in the United Kingdom.
Defined processes and competencies are essential in the operating room along with the allocation of staff. Yet the OR-Barometer 2015 that is published every other year by the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, reveals that only 47 percent of the surveyed nursing staff in the fields of surgery and anesthesiology are satisfied with the level of organization in operating rooms. In this…
Laboratories are an essential part of effective modern healthcare. They provide clinicians with vital information that helps them make life-saving decisions, diagnose conditions and monitor patient treatment.
In the late 1990s, management consultant Julia K Kuark and Swiss communication consultant Hans Ulrich Locher coined the term ‘TopSharing’ – as in job-sharing but, in this case, to describe splitting a senior management role. In Germany, Dr Ulrike Ley, who coaches female doctors, considers the TopSharing model, expanded over a decade by Kuark, is a valid management model for hospitals.…
She is a neuroradiologist, professor, researcher and now the Medical Director of the Department of Neuroradiology at Dresden University Hospital. Her objectives are ambitious – be it in patient care, research or teaching. Professor Jennifer Linn MD wants to increase the quality of care, drive breakthroughs in research, ignite enthusiasm in students for their future profession and last, but not…
The UK pathology sector faces numerous challenges as it strives to create a future medical laboratory workforce. As in many divisions of the National Health Service (NHS), this area has an ageing population yet must evolve against a backdrop of fast-developing technologies, emerging science, financial constraints and the challenge of working in tandem with the private sector. Report: Mark…
