By Dr Modou Jobarteh, Research Associate in nutrition and dietetics
The fact that there are still individuals, families and communities still going to bed hungry every night is arguably the biggest failure of our generation.
Alongside the inherent challenges of the job itself, working in acute healthcare teams comes with another layer of complexity.
On a regular basis, staff will interact with highly specialised professionals from across different disciplines. This means that team members such as anaesthetists, nurses and surgeons need a high level of shared understanding, not only in relation to their main objective but their roles and responsibilities, too.
Shared leadership (SL) – where leadership working relationships are distributed and team members’ unique roles defined – has been proposed as a way to foster effective team performance in such situations.
By Dr Emma Lawrance, Mental Health Innovations Fellow
These are hyper-connected times. We’re told we can get what we want – from dinner to a date – at the tap of a phone screen. And yet, even with the world seemingly at our fingertips, when we are in an emotional crisis or struggling with our mental health, it can be hard to know where to go. And hard to know what to say, when one of our loved ones is brave enough to express what’s truly on their mind.
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken”.
C.S. Lewis
By Joshua Symons, Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation’s Big Data Analytical Unit
Patient data is precious. It’s a resource that many researchers and clinicians use to improve healthcare and therefore the lives of patients and health professionals. That’s why we want to make sure it’s used in a way that’s both effective and safe.
By Anna Lawrence-Jones (co-written with Jean Straus).
This article originally appeared on the UCL Public Engagement blog and has been reposted with permission. Visit the blog to read more about the UCL Centre for Co-Production in Health Research.
In my former job at Cancer Research UK, I organised Sandpit Innovation Workshops that brought together researchers, healthcare professionals and innovative thinkers to come up with novel research ideas to help solve a health challenge. Normally a three-day event, sandpits are a way to generate research ideas – which are inevitably more innovative and daring in this spontaneous environment – and get them funded quickly.
Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is a basic human right. The WHO’s Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom, continues to highlight the importance of UHC by focusing its World Health Day on this topic. Dr Tedros’ top priority is equity for health for all, but how will we achieve the World Health Assembly’s ambitious target of 1 billion more people benefiting from UHC within five years?
By Jonty Roland, IGHI Honorary Research Fellow and Independent Health Systems Consultant.
By dedicating this World Health Day to universal health coverage (UHC), the WHO is continuing to relentlessly bang the drum for ‘health for all’ under its charismatic Director-General. This is a beat that more and more countries are now marching to, with dozens of governments having announced UHC-inspired reforms since Dr Tedros took office two years ago.