The BMJ was one of the first medical journals to seek declarations of competing interests from authors. Our focus is on financial competing interests as we believe these to be the most identifiable. We do, however, understand that competing interests come in many forms and we also routinely ask authors to declare relevant non-financial competing interests. The governing principle has been that ...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that innovative medical devices often arise from physicians' inventive activity, but no studies have documented the extent of such physician-engaged innovation. This paper uses patent data and the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile to provide evidence that physicians contribute to medical device innovation, accounting for almost 20 percent of approxima...

ANNE HARRINGTON, Medicine, mind and the double brain, Princeton University Press, 1987, 8vo, pp. xiii, 322, £24.70. This is a remarkable book, and one that will doubtless become indispensable to students of the history of the neurosciences. It offers a comprehensive account of the growth of ideas within neurology and psychology concerning asymmetries of function between the two hemispheres of t...

The Dutch construction industry has introduced a compulsory preemployment medical examination (PE-ME). Best-evidence contents related to specific job demands are, however, lacking and need to be gathered. After the identification of job demands and health problems in the construction industry (systematic literature search and expert meeting), specific job demands and related requirements were d...

At present, industries within the health and life science sector are moving towards one another resulting in new industries such as the medical nutrition industry. Medical nutrition products are specific nutritional compositions for intervention in disease progression and symptom alleviation. Industry convergence, described as the blurring of boundaries between industries, plays a crucial role ...

In this paper we describe how a lightweight assessment method was developed to educate Irish software development organisations in relation to becoming medical device software suppliers.