Seven years of famine: health care after the crunch

doi:10.1136/bmj.b3237

Published 12 August 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b3237
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3237

Views & Reviews

Personal View

Seven years of famine: health care after the crunch

Muir Gray, founding director, Better Value Healthcare

muir.gray@medknox.net

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The future is not a place, like the Isle of Wight, awaitingour arrival; it is more like the Great Western Railway, somethingthat we have to imagine, design, and build. If we do not buildit, other people will.

Designing the future does not require vision, because, in thewords of the science fiction writer William Gibson, "the futureis already here, it’s just not evenly distributed." Bylooking about we can see many examples of leading edge workthat just needs to be generalised. We do not need vision ordreams, although Pharoah’s dream is probably a perfectlyapt theme for health care after the credit crunch: we have hadseven or so years of plenty, and we all know what comes afterthat. Furthermore, post-crunch health care also arises at theappropriate moment for low carbon health care, for health carein an era of sustainability. Even . . . [Full text of this article]