@benjaminbarr
Professor in Applied Public Health Research. Head WHO collaborating centre for policy research on the determinants of health equity. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/population-health/staff/benjamin-barr/ . Was once an anthropologist, maybe I still am.
Thing is, the UK does not have a shortage of dentists. It has a shortage of NHS Dentists. So what guarantee is there that by expanding the capacity for more overseas dentists to practice will mean they work within the NHS in the so called ‘ dental deserts’? None
www.gov.uk/government/n...
Strait is the gate, narrow is the way.. bsky.app/profile/chri...
Similar to the consensus that there being ‘no safe lower limit’ to alcohol consumption, there is no ‘harmless’ level of driving. To reduce driving harm, driving itself needs to be reduced both by creating a built environment conducive to other modes and by reducing the incentives for driving. Harm is harm, and driving harm needs to be considered alongside the other big commercial killers of our age.
🔔 NEW
Calling for a more coherent policy response to driving harm
✍️ Kate Gray, Grant Ennis, Greg Fell
OPEN ACCESS doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daag026
"Research should not only be independent of vested interests but must also be seen to be so"
My @bmj.com piece with @fphuk.bsky.social president Tracy Daszkiewicz argues we need a public health approach to study the impact of digital technology on health.
#CDOH
www.bmj.com/content/392/...
Data-driven research, at its best, presents you with results that surprise you. 😲
When I began studying Seattle's minimum pay standard for delivery drivers, I personally expected to see high-attachment delivery drivers making more money after the policy went into effect. 1/13
Claude handles it easily.
Listen to the Andrea Mitchell Center podcast🎙
Democracy as a Public Health Intervention
@jlynch13.bsky.social discusses her book Getting Better: The Policy and Politics of Reducing Health Inequalities
https://mitchellcenter.libsyn.com/episode-713-democracy-as-a-public-health-intervention
Chart showing the relationship between life expectancy and median income in parliamentary constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales, 2023
Scotland has long had worse life expectancy than England or Wales – the gap in life expectancy at birth between England and Scotland was ~2 years in 2023. In areas with similar average incomes, life expectancies are similar in England and Wales, but lower in Scotland.
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Stop focusing on masculinity & masculine role models & start focusing on humanity & personhood, stop limiting the outline of what sort of people men can be, step outside the lines www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Possibly relevant: Certain academic publishers won't even consider research articles based on public datasets without additional validation. www.science.org/content/arti...
Agree on both counts
The distinction between an individual's vaccine hesitant or anti-vax beliefs as pertains to their uptake of vaccine is not that clear. Which is what PH guy was saying. This is different from people who use positions of power to promote anti Vax policy (who may or may not hold anti-vax beliefs)
If I don't trust governments and think what they say about vaccines is a conspiracy to control me, perhaps because said governments have used medicine in such a way in the past - am I vaccine hesitant or anti-vax?
Much like the anti- vaxers some reject scientific evidence ( of public health communication) to maintain their need for moral superiority.
Unfortunately some will reject the evidence of public health communication, confused by the misinformation that calling people morons is a good way to change behaviour. We can just meet them where they are?
Pretty difficult to refute a single thing in this perfect assessment of where the f**k we are, from @iandunt.bsky.social:
Reminds me, here's a shiny app to simulate regression to the mean
andif.shinyapps.io/regressionto...
An economically, politically and morally bankrupt strategy.
Bad for individuals, bad for families, bad for businesses, bad for public services, bad for integration and cohesion.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Want to stop Farage with your vote? At the moment you can’t – and Starmer must fix that | Polly Toynbee
“The FPTP voting system was the fortress sustaining the old parties, but “small” parties have stormed the walls. YouGov finds that Farage could become PM on a 23% vote. Voting has become a fruit machine with random results when tiny shifts bring cascading seats”
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Genuinely curious: are you sure you can draw that boundary easily? Is it OK for an ESL speaker to use Grammarly? What about generating a ggplot chart by looking up code on Stack Overflow? What if both of those are done by Claude but human-verified? Or the line drawn when the agentic tool is used?
1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health
By the 19th century London was mostly built on dead people, and with no sign of the populace stopping dying any time soon, burial space was running out.
One answer was the necropolitan railway, to shunt stiffs safely out of the city and off to the world's biggest city of the dead:
When will we get labour MPs defecting to the greens..
The governments' involvement of the public in this has been terrible. Most people in Lancashire don't know they will lose their local government.
"While votes at 16 is a genuinely historic step, how motivated will young voters feel when, for so many, their vote will almost certainly change nothing?
The most powerful thing we could do to engage all voters is to give them a system in which their votes actually matter."
Well said 👇
Beware of Small States: Lebanon since 1975 A masterclass by Elia Ayoub, PhD Class #2 March-April '26 REGISTRATIONS ARE OPEN!
This is uncomfortable timing but I have to advertise my second online masterclass on Lebanon, which is starting soon.
There are still a few spots available so if you're interested you'll find all the info you need in the thread below.
To book: thefirethesetimes.com/lebanonclass/
Here goes 🧵
Palantir currently runs the tech that links our health data across the NHS
www.bmj.com/content/386/...
#statstab #495 Unsure Calculator
Thoughts: Nifty way to incorporate your uncertainty when making some calculations and decisions.
#uncertainty #calculator #unsure #chance #sensitivity
filiph.github.io/unsure/
This is great.
I've given an example in class showing how priors can make some unidentified problems identifiable:
a+b=6, solve for b.
Prior: a=0~4