Medicine and Science from The BMJ

It's been 25 years since the declaration on the rights of women, was signed in Beijing - and in that time the landscape of health car inequity has changed. To celebrate we created 3 podcasts, in collaboration with The WHO and UN University, as part of the collection on Women’s Health and Gender Inequalities www.bmj.com/gender In these podcasts we'll be hosting conversations between women early in, and some who are more advanced in, their careers - doctors, researchers, legislators and campaigners, all working towards building a future in which women can thrive. As well as these in depth discussions, you will hear some shorter interviews from experts who have written for the collection. These give you a flavour of the bigger discussions going on in global health when it comes to gender equity - so keep an ear out for those during the discussions. In this podcast, we're joined by lawyer and activist Hina Jilani, who has been campaigning for women's rights in her native Pakistan for her whole life. She and her sister set up the first female law firm in the country, she established a refuge for women who were fleeing violence and abuse, she was one of the founders of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and is now an advocate on the country's Supreme Court. She is also one of The Elders. Hina talks about her career, how she has pulled the various levers of change - lobbying for legislation, legal challenge, and protest - to improve the lives of women in Pakistan. The additional interviews are from; Lia Quatrapella, Asha George, and Veloshnee Govender

In the wellbeing podcast, we have had a lot of personal experience of the pandemic, and schemes to support staff - but always we've wanted to know if there's research which can tell us how universal those experiences have been. In this podcast, Abi and Cat are joined by Danielle Lamb, senior research fellow at University College London, and Sam Gnanapragasam, clinical fellow in psychiatry at South London and the Maudsley NHS Trust. Danielle and Sam are both investigators on NHS Check - a representative survey of NHS staff about their mental wellbeing during covid-19. https://nhscheck.org/

The 19th of July in the UK saw the relaxation of covid rules that have been in place for 18 months - social distancing requirements in venues, mask wearing in public will no longer be legally mandated. There are a lot of questions about what this will mean for the pandemic, and in this episode of Talk Evidence Helen MacDonald, Joe Ross and Duncan Jarvies are joined by Iain Buchan, professor of public health in Liverpool, who has been involved in 2 key studies on covid transmission. Firstly, lateral flow tests - the big questions has been how well do they work in the wild - and how well do they have to work, to be useful in test trace and isolate? Iain tells us about new research into the innova test. Secondly, events - the football has shown that events can still be a big source of transmission, and the UK government put in place a number of trial events, all carefully monitored by public health researchers - Iain tells us about one nightclub test in Liverpool, and what we can glean from it. Reading list; Performance of the Innova SARS-CoV-2 antigen rapid lateral flow test in the Liverpool asymptomatic testing pilot: population based cohort study https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1637 The UK government's events programme https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/events-research-programme-phase-i-findings/events-research-programme-phase-i-findings#findings https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/979461/S1195_Science_framework_for_opening_up_group_events.pdf Effect of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 on life expectancy across populations in the USA and other high income countries: simulations of provisional mortality data https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1343 Optimizing Therapy to Prevent Avoidable Hospital Admissions in Multimorbid Older Adults (OPERAM): cluster randomised controlled trial https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1585 Efficacy, acceptability, and safety of muscle relaxants for adults with non-specific low back pain: systematic review and meta-analysis https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1446

It's been 25 years since the declaration on the rights of women, was signed in Beijing - and in that time the landscape of health car inequity has changed. To celebrate we created 3 podcasts, in collaboration with The WHO and UN University, as part of the collection on Women’s Health and Gender Inequalities www.bmj.com/gender In these podcasts we'll be hosting conversations between women early in, and some who are more advanced in, their careers - doctors, researchers, legislators and campaigners, all working towards building a future in which women can thrive. As well as these in depth discussions, you will hear some shorter interviews from experts who have written for the collection. These give you a flavour of the bigger discussions going on in global health when it comes to gender equity - so keep an ear out for those during the discussions. In this first podcast, Lulit Yonas Mengesha talks to Cara Tannenbaum Lulit Yonas Mengesha is right at the beginning of her medical career, she's a medical student in Ethiopia, but has already become passionate about woman's health Cara Tannenbaum is is Scientific Director of the Institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Lulit and Cara discuss how women have been excluded from healthcare research - and how that affects practice today, how there are gaps in our understanding of basic biology, as well as how different life experiences affect outcomes. The additional interviews are from; Lavanya Vijayasingham, Claudia Lopes, and Claire Wenham

We know the pandemic has disproportionately affected the NHS workers who come from a ethnic minorities, we also know that doctors from an ethnic minority face additional barriers to accessing support - so how well have the various support schemes put in place during the pandemic helped those doctors from ethnic minorities? Dammie Olubawale, medical student and grants and partnerships manager at Melanin Medics, joins us to talk about a fund they've created specifically to help doctors of black African and Caribbean heritage, to access support tailored to them. Dammie explains some of the reasons which doctors, particularly from that heritage, may be more reluctant to access support - and how organisations large and small need to think about tailoring their wellbeing initiatives to include all staff. To access the melanin medics wellbeing fund visit https://www.melaninmedics.com/wellbeing-fund

It's been 25 years since the declaration on the rights of women, was signed in Beijing - and in that time the landscape of health car inequity has changed. To celebrate we created 3 podcasts, in collaboration with The WHO and UN University, as part of the collection on Women’s Health and Gender Inequalities https://www.bmj.com/gender In these podcasts we'll be hosting conversations between women early in, and some who are more advanced in, their careers - doctors, researchers, legislators and campaigners, all working towards building a future in which women can thrive. As well as these in depth discussions, you will hear some shorter interviews from experts who have written for the collection. These give you a flavour of the bigger discussions going on in global health when it comes to gender equity - so keep an ear out for those during the discussions. In this first podcast, Adrienne Germaine talks to Fila Magnus. Adrienne starter her career as an activist for women's health in the 1970s, and went on to become president of the International Women's Health Coalition Fila Magnus is Director of Communications at the International Youth Alliance for Family Planning, and was born in the same year as the Declaration was signed. Fila and Adrienne discuss campaigning, now and then, and how the work that led to the declaration can be built on, but is never over... The additional interviews are from; Emma Fulu, Sheena Hadi, Oswaldo Montoya, and Claudia Garcia-Moreno.

In this Talk Evidence, Helen Macdonald, Joe Ross and Duncan Jarvies discuss what's going on in the world of EBM. Firstly, a while ago on the podcast, we concluded that excess mortality would be the best way to measure the impact of the pandemic - and now a new paper looks at different country's excess mortalitites over the past year. We're joined by author Nazrul Islam Physician-Epidemiologist at the University of Oxford (and a research editor for The BMJ) to talk about why comparisons may still not be sensible. Read the full research here - https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1137 The Delta variant is dominating headlines, and infections in the UK now - but until recently the Alpha one was ascendent, and new research has helped characterise how the mortality rate of that variant differed from previous viruses. We discuss how that research was done. Read the full research - https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n579 GP data in the UK - the planned cut-off for granting access to your GP data for researchers has been extended, but there are still a lot of questions remaining. Helen has tried to find out some basic answers, and is still confused. Finally, the FDA has approved a new drug for treatment of dementia - and researchers (and the FDA's own panel of experts) are up in arms. Joe Ross tells us why he thinks the decision was the wrong one, and why patients may be harmed because of it. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/17/opinions/biogen-alzheimers-drug-opinion-ramachandra-ross/index.html

We've been bringing you stories of doctors wellbeing for a while in the podcast, but we noticed a pattern. Woman would come on and talk about their own difficulties, men would talk about other peoples - so we wanted to dive into that a bit, and called out on twitter for men who would be willing to open up to our listeners about their own mental health. This interview is with Zeshan Quereshi - registrar in paediatrics, author and TedX talker. In this conversation we talk about why it is that men are particularly disinclined to open up about their difficulties at work, and what Zeshan has done to try and support his own. Zeshan's TedX talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uctoTk64GVM

Finally it seems that life might return to normal in the UK, as the vaccination efforts continue apace, and despite concern about increasingly spreading variants, our hospitals are not being overwhelmed. Because of this, we are changing our approach to covering the pandemic - and taking this second wave podcast to pastures new, but before that, in this last episode we’re going to look backwards and forwards, at the UK’s response. On the panel today are Matt Morgan, consultant in critical care, Nisreen Alwan, associate professor in public health, Partha Kar, consultant in diabetes, and Helen Salisbury, GP. www.bmj.com/coronavirus

The pandemic has wrought a lot of change, not least to doctors relationship to their careers. While still loving the patient interaction, we're increasingly hearing that doctors are disillusioned with the other aspects of medicine. If you're feeling that way, there are ways to structure your thinking to help you make sense of your career. In this podcast Claire Kaye, former portfolio GP and now coach, explains how she went about deciding medicine wasn't for her, and how she helps doctors go through that process too. You can find Claire at https://www.drclairekaye.com/ https://www.instagram.com/drclairekaye_executivecoaching/