In the rescue of health leaders and health guides

Salvador Casado

In the area of public health, where I have been working for a long time, we have suffered a profound crisis of leadership. Although all positions of responsibility are well filled and more and more management positions are being designed, paradoxically it is rare to find managers or professionals who lead teams towards specific objectives or missions that open new paths.

The usual path is the protocol, not to get out of the established, to avoid changes and innovation and not to leave the office or the consultation to skip hazards.

This attitude in management staff is being imitated by ordinary professionals who follow their instructions. The overload of care and institutional neglect cause family doctors to barely leave their offices to implement some community activities, nurses and social workers the same and in hospitals everything is considered within the service interacting as little as possible with primary care services or other agents.

Overdiagnosis in depression: there are doors better left closed

Andrés Fontalba

A young Cecilia, aged 13, in Sofia Coppola's brilliant film based on the homonymous novel, "The suicide virgins" advised:

-Obviously doctor, you were never a 13-year-old girl.

It’s obvious that depression in children and adolescents is an important cause of disability and generates great suffering for the person and his or her environment, requiring specific management adapted to the needs of that peculiar age. Based on the severity of this pathology, the availability of effective screening tools in the detection of depression, and a treatment that improves prognosis, the United States Preventive Task Force in 2009 recommended the screening for depression in all adolescents in a medical and integrated with mental health services setting, despite not having any previous trials that would justify this intervention.

The English surgeon, talking about Henry Marsh

Not too long ago, after having read his book "Surgery, the ultimate placebo", I wrote about Ian Harris, an Australian traumatologist. I remember that Harris defends the rigor in the surgical indications after having observed that more than half of the surgery that is practiced does not have enough support of consistent scientific evidence. Now I have finished the book "Do no harm", by Henry Marsh, an English neurosurgeon at the lintel of retirement, and I am inevitably immersed in the comparison between the two texts: first, Harris's, is written by someone who loves surgery and believes that too often is practiced with little rigor, while the second, Marsh’s, is a biography of great literary level, elaborated from the notes that the surgeon has been taking throughout his career, not in vain has he received several recognitions. Marsh, like Harris, is passionate about his work, but his literary contribution comes not from scientific exaltation but from the knowledge he has accumulated from his own mistakes. The veteran English neurosurgeon has not published any revealing research nor has he led any innovative discovery. His honesty and his hands are his strength.

Self-management: Buurtzorg Identity

Frederic Laloux in "Reinventing organizations" describes the teal-evolutionary companies as those based on the personal growth of their employees and chooses Buurtzorg Netherland as an organization to which we should be paying attention to if we are among those who believe that the time to do things differently has arrived.

What is Buurtzorg Netherland?

Buurtzorg Netherland is a non-profit company, which was founded in 2007 in the Netherlands, when a group of community nurses rethought their work and came to believe that, instead of only going to homes and exercising the functions of their profession, they should advance to becoming the patients’ referee and take charge of attending to their global needs.

I don’t know ... but it seems to me that times are changing

Joan Escarrabill

Health care’s future is an issue that is debated multiple times. The most academic visions or those that start from the observation of reality have common elements. Increasing the number of professionals (more doctors and nurses are needed, is strongly agreed), to the extent that the weight of the hospital will be reduced and interventions in the community will gain prominence, health education of the population is very important or in what way are we going to create sustainability in a system that has contributed significant improvements during the last years, can be just a few examples of these common places of all the debates.