The Herald reports that a report by Martin Dawe of the first two weeks of the Swine Flu epidemic is intensely critical of the lack of planning and poor coordination of data resources. This was the MacDoctor’s impression of the entire debacle. I knew of a potentially deadly strain of Mexican flu three days before [...]

The case of the young man who died from a brain abscess following a open fracture of his skull given to him in a drunken brawl is quite unusual. The defense is probably making much of the fact that the doctor “missed” the fracture in an attempt to pass the “blame” of the death onto [...]

The Herald on Sunday contains articles on two extremely misfortunate deaths. The first is Lam Xuan Hu, a 24-year-old Vietnamese student who died when a wheel from a truck, traveling in the opposite direction on the freeway in Auckland, came adrift and crashed through a bus. This unfortunate young man, a recent arrival to New [...]

Just to keep the “Evil Labtests” story ticking over (before the next big story where the HDC tells you it has received 20,000 complaints about labtests – all from a little old lady in Palmerston North), the Herald tells us about a wrong result. And how it made a patient worried. Not dead, just worried. [...]

Ron Paterson, the former Health and Disability Commissioner, is going to head up a research project into “the best practice on how the public can be confident any given medical practitioner is “a good doctor”“. While this sounds superficially like a worthy undertaking, you can be assured that the conclusions arrived at will probably be [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article. It was inevitable that the sentinel event report , designed to help hospitals improve systems, would be seized upon by journalists to score some easy sensational headlines. The Dom Post supplies us with this fine headline: Hospitals to blame in [...]

Just occasionally, when the media run a “bad doctor” story, the doctor is actually bad. Such is the story of Sajan Bhatia, the disgraced Southland urologist, who has apparently continued to practice as a doctor long after the medical council refused to renew his practicing certificate. This is the medical equivalent of a hanging offense. [...]

The sad story of the death of diabetic Mrs. Maureen Pineki is the subject of an even sadder report released by the Auckland DHB today. The reason it is sad is because it comes to almost the entirely wrong conclusions about this poor lady’s death. The report urges: RECOMMENDATIONS LABTESTS: Review systems to ensure timely [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article. This is what happens when legitimate studies are reported sensationally: Bad doctors most likely to be men, report shows Women make safer doctors than men, Britain’s largest study of medical performance has found. They are less likely to be [...]

Mercifully, there is no blaring “Labtests is evil” news item in the media today, but I note that the Herald can’t resist a dig at Labtests in this article on the tragic story of a woman who died from what appears to be a hypoglycaemic (very low blood sugar) episode. Mrs Pineki had a home [...]