Musings and Mopeds in Vietnam – Part 2

Maggie Helliwell Apr. 22, 2016

This is a guest post by Maggie Helliwell, retired English general practitioner and former Vice Chair of NICE. See also Part 1. We visited five different types of primary care health clinics, one in central Hanoi and four in the provinces and villages. They were immaculately clean, reasonably well-appointed facilities – with good basic equipment including simple laboratory machines, ultrasound, …

Musings and Mopeds in Vietnam – Part 1

Maggie Helliwell Apr. 1, 2016

This is a guest post by Maggie Helliwell, retired English general practitioner and former Vice Chair of NICE  One morning early in 2016, an email popped into my inbox from NICE International: Would I like to go to Vietnam in March to help the Ministry of Health develop their primary care strategy? At first I had to say no as …

Cuban medical education: The cat that couldn’t bark?

Shah Ibrahim Mar. 17, 2015

The award of almost 200 free scholarships to enable students from United States of America to study medicine in Cuba came as quite a surprise at an All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health meeting on 4 March 2015, chaired by Lord Crisp, titled ‘Potential Lessons for Primary Care Emerging from the Cuban Model of Medical Education’.  Surely the USA’s …