Frozen shoulder or adhesive capsulitis is a condition which severely restricts shoulder movements and makes them painful. It usually happens in people with diabetes or those with injuries to the shoulder muscle (rotator cuff tear). It is also more commonly seen in women, and in people above 40. “In most cases, a frozen shoulder can…
Some years ago, a farmer from Gujarat came to Sitaram Bhartia with his adolescent son, feeling distressed about his behaviour. He would spend hours standing in front of a mirror in a girl’s clothes and would tell everyone he met that he was not a boy. He had even told people to start addressing him…
Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers found in men and usually, 1 in 8 men are diagnosed with it. Most often, prostate issues are noticed when men face difficulty with passing urine. Prakash Nanda, a 60 year old man, had been waking up multiple times during the night because he felt the…
On the evening of July 9, 2016, I was nervous about the “sharing and learning session” I was to facilitate at Sitaram Bhartia the next day. This was going to be the first-of-its-kind session at the hospital where five teams were going to share their improvement stories with each other. Neither were they going to…
“We discussed this internally but don’t feel we have the bandwidth to travel to Mexico” I wrote to small nonprofit in India, whose target population was very different – middle-class women in Delhi subject to over-intervention in maternity care rather than the most marginalized populations dying from access to care. My doubts were quickly put…
When I was asked to register for the small non-profit hospital in Delhi, I wondered whether the conference would be applicable for our setting because many of the topics seemed related to public health. But Abhishek Bhartia, our director, thought differently, and soon we were in London to attend what turned out to be a…
“A leader must be able to define an ideal state and get people enthused about moving towards it” said Dr Prab Prabhakar, a consultant paediatric neurologist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), as we sat down together in my office. I had met Dr Prabhakar a few months ago in London and was pleased…
Every year we celebrate International Nurses Day on Florence Nightingale’s birthday. In our hospital it’s a time when nurses dress up in their best, renew their pledge to serve, collect awards, and put on a cultural program. For the third year in a row I was asked to say a few words. Last year I…
**This post originally appeared on the BMJ Quality Blog. Change is always hard and most of the times we hate to change. Often, attempts to change or improve in an organization are met with resistance, making failure and frustration the common outcomes of change initiatives. In the summer of 2012, I was two years into…
Sixty-four different sites – many with high rates of child poverty and complex long-term conditions; high proportion of ethnic minorities; 14 care-commissioning groups who demand different quality metrics; and a focus on mental health and community care – not the most remunerative areas in healthcare. All this complexity hasn’t prevented East London NHS Foundation Trust…