The BMJ Podcast

By BMJ Group

What's The BMJ Podcast about?

The BMJ is an international peer reviewed medical journal and a fully “online first” publication. The BMJ’s vision is to be the world’s most influential and widely read medical journal. Our mission is to lead the debate on health and to engage, inform, and stimulate doctors, researchers, and other health professionals in ways that will improve outcomes for patients. We aim to help doctors to make better decisions.

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Measure the broader impacts...

04.10.2021

The synergistic linking of increasing health and wealth is broadly accepted - it's an integral part of the thinking between the Sustainable Development Goals, and the World Bank's call for universal healthcare as a way of boosting a country's economy. ...

The BMJ Podcast episodes:

04.10.2021 Measure the broader impacts of healthcare The synergistic linking of increasing health and wealth is broadly accepted - it's an integral part of the thinking between the Sustainable Development Goals, and the World Bank's call for universal healthcare as a way of boosting a country's economy. ...
04.02.2021 Talk Evidence - children and covid, varients of concern, ivormectin update The evidence geekery continues, and this week Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvies are joined again by Joe Ross, The BMJ's US research editor, and professor of medicine and public health at Yale. This week we update you on treatment - ...
03.25.2021 Coronavirus second wave - vaccination roll out changes, uncertainty about long covid In the UK, phase 2 of our coronavirus vaccination strategy may be delayed by supply problems, at the same time many GPs, who carried out the majority of the first vaccination phases, are declining to take on the addition burden ...
03.18.2021 Wellbeing - Put yourself first In this Wellbeing podcast, sponsored by medical protection, Abi Rimmer and Cat Chatfield talk to Susanna Petche and Reina Popat, GPs and members of First You - an organisation of healthcare workers, promoting wellbeing in the NHS. They discuss why ...
03.15.2021 What should "following the science" mean for government policy? This round table, recorded at the nuffield summit 2021, asks what does following the science actually mean - do ministers understand the nuance of the science in the pandemic, and how does uncertainty get interpreted through the lens of ideology ...
03.12.2021 Talk Evidence - Inside the JCVI, and the key to grading evidence In a slightly different talk evidence, Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvies are bringing you a couple, of in depth interviews, Firstly, Anthony Harnden, GP, academic and member of the UK's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation takes us inside their ...
03.08.2021 Stephen Thomas - Behind the scenes in the Pfizer vaccine trial Never has the spotlight been as strong on a clinical trial as that on the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, the first approved for covid-19. In this interview, Joanne Silberner spoke to its lead principal investigator, Stephen Thomas chief of infectious diseases ...
03.03.2021 Coronavirus second wave - cancelled surgery, increasing waiting lists Many surgeries have been cancelled during the pandemic, with good reason, as early data showed the increase in mortality associated with a coronavirus infection, but now waiting lists grow, and there are questions about how the NHS will pick up ...
02.26.2021 Wellbeing - speaking out about mental health in the NHS Ashling Lillis is a now consultant in acute medicine at Whittington Health NHS Trust, but she was almost a consultant in intensive care medicine - but a mental health crisis just 6 months before she qualified made her reassess her ...
02.19.2021 The BMJ Interview - Jeremy Farrar; sharing the vaccine is enlightened self interest Jeremy Farrar, is director of the Wellcome Trust, as well as advisor to the government on SAGE. Trained as a medic and with a PhD in neuro-immunology, he was a professor of Tropical Medicine and Global health at the University ...
02.17.2021 Corona virus second wave - Palliative care, and online abuse In this podcast, Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of The BMJ, talks to; Partha Kar, consultant in diabetes and endocrinology in Portsmouth, Helen Salisbury, GP in Oxfordshire, and Nisreen Alwan, public health consultant in Southampton. This week our special guest ...
02.12.2021 Wellbeing special - A post vaccination mindfullness moment The observation period, after receiving a covid-19 vaccination may be the only 15 minutes someone in the NHS might get all day. In this podcast, we're joined again by Chris Bu, psychiatry trainee who has previously spoken to us about ...
02.12.2021 Talk Evidence - re-hospitalistion for covid-19, remote hypertension intervention The evidence geekery continues, and this week Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvies are joined by Joe Ross, The BMJ's US research editor, and professor of medicine and public health at Yale. This week we pick up on a preprint in ...
02.09.2021 Neil Greenberg on tackling PTSD in the NHS Neil Greenberg is a psychiatrist, and professor of Defence Mental Health at King's College London. He spent 23 in the military, and now continues to work with them on things like peer led traumatic stress support packages. A recent survey ...
02.08.2021 The BMJ interview - Jeremy Hunt MP Jeremy Hunt probably needs no introduction to our audience - the UK's longest serving health minister, he now chairs Westminster's Health and Social Care Committee - the powerful committee that holds the government to account for its policy choices. In ...
02.04.2021 Coronavirus second wave - The NHS one year on The "public health emergency of international concern" was issued by the WHO a year and a lifetime ago. As the UK ramps up testing for the South African virus variant, and is full steam ahead on vaccination, we look back ...
02.02.2021 The BMJ interview - Tom Frieden, former CDC director on why we thought we were prepared It’s been just over a year since the WHO declared the pandemic a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” - if you cast your mind back to then, the news was full of reassurances about how prepared the UK and ...
01.27.2021 Coronavirus second wave - 100,000 deaths Recorded on the 26th January 2021 The UK has become, officially, the worst performing country in terms of Covid-19 deaths, per head of population - and the number of people in hospital is still higher than at any point in ...
01.20.2021 Coronavirus second wave - The view from the front line In the UK, over 37,000 people are in hospital with covid-19, and the NHS comes closer than ever to being overwhelmed - though 4 million people have received their first dose of the vaccine, we are warned that things will ...
01.19.2021 The BMJ interview: Fixing America’s covid response in the Biden era US president elect Joe Biden wasted no time in appointing a special advisory board of experts to guide America out of its coronavirus crisis. One of those experts is Celine Gounder, an infectious diseases epidemiologist who has worked on Ebola, ...
01.16.2021 Talk Evidence - Lateral flow tests update, not the best public health approach In this episode of Talk Evidence, Jon Deeks, professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, returns to the pod with an update on lateral flow tests - and why the government plan for using them in asymptomatic screening for ...
01.14.2021 The BMJ Interview - Andrew Pollard on the Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine Andrew Pollard is Director of the Oxford Vaccines Group - who, along with Astra Zeneca, have developed an modified adenovirus vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. In this interview we talk to him about the development of that vaccine - what he thinks ...
01.12.2021 Wellbeing - where to turn for emotional support during the pandemic The Samaritans have traditionally been there for people in a crisis, those who are on the verge of ending their life by suicide - but during this pandemic, with the personal toll of caring for covid-19 patients, they are also ...
01.08.2021 Food aid - helping providers support the health of their users The growth in the need for food aid, in the UK, has been staggering. That's why The BMJ has chosen the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) as its annual charity appeal. Nutritional guidelines which work for everyone is difficult, even ...
01.06.2021 Coronavirus second wave - The UK's fourth lockdown Recorded Tuesday 5th Jan 2021 As the UK enters lockdown, again, schools are closed, the NHS struggles under the surge of cases, new variants of SARS-COV-2 virus stalk the world, and vaccination programmes make a faltering start. In this podcast, ...
01.05.2021 Listening is the first part of research The BMJ has long campaigned for better patient and public participation in research, making the case that it leads to better outcomes for patients and for society - but an article published in the Christmas edition of The BMJ goes ...
01.03.2021 A (non-systematic) evidence review of 2020 As 2021 hoves into view, we look back at a year of extraordinary evidence. Helen Macdonald is joined by Joe Ross, one of The BMJ's research editors, as well as a researcher at Yale. They discuss the way in which ...
01.01.2021 The Deep Breath talking wellbeing evidence round-up of the year. In this end-of-year podcast from Deep Breath In, we're bringing you a light hearted look back at 2020, and trying to remember some of the non-covid-19 medicine that has crossed our desks. This festive quiz features the deep breath in ...
12.28.2020 Talking Christmas evidence - how Christmas research is chosen If you've had time to digest this year's Christmas edition of The BMJ, you might have wondered how those papers get into The BMJ. Well in this Talk Evidence podcast, Helen Macdonald, UK research editor at The BMJ talks to ...
12.24.2020 Wellbeing - Human factors, and Christmas Logistics How do human behaviours affect patient outcomes? And what has that got to do with Christmas? Graham Shaw, director of Critical Factors, and Peter Brennan, a maxillofacial surgeon in Portsmouth, join us to explain what human factors are, why they’re ...
12.23.2020 Food insecurity in the 6th largest economy Every year, the BMJ has a charity appeal - we’ve regularly focused on organisations like MSF, or Lifebox - providing support to areas of the world which don’t have good healthcare provision… This year though, covid-19 has changed everything - ...
12.22.2020 The soundscape of a hospital Until hear death in 2019, Annabel and her husband James Weaver, spent a lot of time together in hospitals - in patient and outpatient wards, waiting in makeshift waiting rooms in corridors and atriums. And while you or I might ...
12.18.2020 Rob Poynton wants you to pause Robert Poynton is an associate fellow of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and author of books designed to help people work in ways which help both their career and wellbeing. In this wellbeing podcast, we focus ...
12.16.2020 Coronavirus second wave - Should we cancel Christmas? As London and some neighbouring counties move up to tier 3, and Germany, Italy and The Netherlands impose tighter restrictions over over the coming days of Christmas, in this podcast we ask - should Christmas gatherings be cancelled? In this ...
12.14.2020 Inside a vaccine trial The last few weeks we’ve been feverish in our coverage of vaccines - the evidence base for them is, how they’ve been evaluated and licensed, and who’s going to get them first. But what we’ve not covered much is what ...
12.11.2020 Talk evidence covid-19 update - poor public messaging, and vaccine approval data The vaccines are being rolled out - but approval is still on an emergency basis, and the evidence underpinning those decisions is only just becoming available for scrutiny. In this podcast we talk to Baruch Fischhoff, professor at Carnegie Mellon ...
12.08.2020 Coronavirus second wave - the vaccine's here, but the pandemic isn't over As the first people outside of a trial have started receiving Pfizer's sars-cov-2 vaccine, including Matt, but that's not the end of the story for the pandemic, there are still logistics of rollout, plus treating those who have already contracted ...
12.04.2020 Lockdown lessons from an Antarctic winter Anne Hicks, is an emergency medicine consultant in Plymouth, and for 16 years was the medical director for the British Antarctic Survey (she stepped down last year). The British Antarctic Survey operates all through the antarctic winter - where for ...
12.02.2020 Corona virus second wave - Fears for tiers As the first vaccine for corona virus is approved, and England joins the other nations of the UK outside of full lockdown, we are all entering tiers of restrictions - variable across the country, which will continue until that vaccine ...
12.01.2020 Calum Semple - the efficacy of mass testing in Liverpool The government has decided to pursue a strategy of mass-testing in Liverpool, in a pilot to see what effect that has on containment of corona virus. A lot of criticism has been levelled at the scheme, from the sensitivity of ...
11.26.2020 Why the government is being sued over PPE contracts The BMJ is a champion of openness and transparency in research, in clinical practice and in health policy. However, if you’ve kept and eye on the journals recently, you’ll have seen that governments have been less diligent about keeping an ...
11.24.2020 Coronavirus second wave - recentring patients in our covid-19 response As further promising news emerges of vaccine effectiveness, although still with no data published, and as plans emerge for the return home of university students and limited festive winter celebrations. But as we talked about in the last podcast, there ...
11.21.2020 Talk evidence covid-19 update - uncertainty in treatment, uncertainty in prevention Uncertainty abounds - even as we get better data on treatments, with the big RCTs beginning to report, and new trials on masks, the evidence remains uncertain, in both the statistical realm (confidence intervals crossing 0) and in what to ...
11.20.2020 Wellbeing - What we've learned from treating doctors Clare Gerada and Zaid Al-Najjar have been treating doctors for a while now, through the NHS Practitioner Programme. In that time they have noticed some themes in the issues that bring doctors to them, from isolation to stress. In this ...
11.17.2020 Coronavirus second wave - vaccines, how ready is the needle to hit the arm? Covid-19 continues its grip on the Northern Hemisphere alongside news of a vaccine trial showing real success at first glance. In this second wave update, we explore the latest issues with healthcare professionals from primary care, secondary care, and public ...
11.13.2020 How well did hospitals perform for their staff during covid? In the first wave of covid-19, hospitals started to reconfigure space and services, to provide rest areas and food for staff, to help them cope with the surge in patients. Michael West, professor professor of work and organisational psychology at ...
11.11.2020 Coronavirus second wave - viral transmission and a vaccine announcement Covid-19 continues its grip on the Northern Hemisphere alongside news of a vaccine trial showing real success at first glance. In this second wave update, we explore the latest issues with healthcare professionals from primary care, secondary care, and public ...
11.05.2020 A lump in the throat with Nick Hamilton, Deonne Dersch-Mills and Bonnie Kaplan A lump in the throat is a classic GP presentation, but one that often causes a lot of worry. Many people are struggling with high levels of anxiety anyway at the moment, and this may manifest physical symptoms, such as ...
11.03.2020 Coronavirus second wave - Making the lockdown work As the second spike in covid-19 cases grows, we want to take stock of what's happening in the NHS. In these second wave updates, clinicians from primary care, secondary care, and public health, discuss what is happening in their field, ...
10.30.2020 Talk evidence covid-19 update - talking risk, remdesivir, and relevant research In this talk evidence covid-19 update, we’re taking on risk - how do you figure out your individual risk of dying from the disease? Try QCovid, but remember that it’s figuring out your risk back in April. When it comes ...

Older episodes

The BMJ Podcast

What's The BMJ Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The BMJ Podcast episodes:

Measure the broader impacts of healthcare

Talk Evidence - children and covid, varients of concern, ivormectin update

Coronavirus second wave - vaccination roll out changes, uncertainty about long covid

Wellbeing - Put yourself first

What should "following the science" mean for government policy?

Talk Evidence - Inside the JCVI, and the key to grading evidence

Stephen Thomas - Behind the scenes in the Pfizer vaccine trial

Coronavirus second wave - cancelled surgery, increasing waiting lists

Wellbeing - speaking out about mental health in the NHS

The BMJ Interview - Jeremy Farrar; sharing the vaccine is enlightened self interest

Corona virus second wave - Palliative care, and online abuse

Wellbeing special - A post vaccination mindfullness moment

Talk Evidence - re-hospitalistion for covid-19, remote hypertension intervention

Neil Greenberg on tackling PTSD in the NHS

The BMJ interview - Jeremy Hunt MP

Coronavirus second wave - The NHS one year on

The BMJ interview - Tom Frieden, former CDC director on why we thought we were prepared

Coronavirus second wave - 100,000 deaths

Coronavirus second wave - The view from the front line

The BMJ interview: Fixing America’s covid response in the Biden era

Talk Evidence - Lateral flow tests update, not the best public health approach

The BMJ Interview - Andrew Pollard on the Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine

Wellbeing - where to turn for emotional support during the pandemic

Food aid - helping providers support the health of their users

Coronavirus second wave - The UK's fourth lockdown

Listening is the first part of research

A (non-systematic) evidence review of 2020

The Deep Breath talking wellbeing evidence round-up of the year.

Talking Christmas evidence - how Christmas research is chosen

Wellbeing - Human factors, and Christmas Logistics

Food insecurity in the 6th largest economy

The soundscape of a hospital

Rob Poynton wants you to pause

Coronavirus second wave - Should we cancel Christmas?

Inside a vaccine trial

Talk evidence covid-19 update - poor public messaging, and vaccine approval data

Coronavirus second wave - the vaccine's here, but the pandemic isn't over

Lockdown lessons from an Antarctic winter

Corona virus second wave - Fears for tiers

Calum Semple - the efficacy of mass testing in Liverpool

Why the government is being sued over PPE contracts

Coronavirus second wave - recentring patients in our covid-19 response

Talk evidence covid-19 update - uncertainty in treatment, uncertainty in prevention

Wellbeing - What we've learned from treating doctors

Coronavirus second wave - vaccines, how ready is the needle to hit the arm?

How well did hospitals perform for their staff during covid?

Coronavirus second wave - viral transmission and a vaccine announcement

A lump in the throat with Nick Hamilton, Deonne Dersch-Mills and Bonnie Kaplan

Coronavirus second wave - Making the lockdown work

Talk evidence covid-19 update - talking risk, remdesivir, and relevant research

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