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Imagine trying to deal with sick patients on a busy hospital ward while your pager is going off, the cleaner is vacuuming, and nurses are asking you to sign ad-hoc prescriptions for other patients. That is the reality of a busy ward round for a junior doctor. And all those distractions can take a doctor’s eye off the ball and lead to mistakes; sometimes life-threatening ones. That is why surgeon Ian Thomas, from the north of Scotland, has been testing a new training session for senior medical students which simulates a busy ward round, complete with actors playing sick patients and realistic distractions. Mr Ian Thomas’ research was published in the journal BMJ Quality and Safety.

Indian Healthcare
Malpractise and corruption in India's largely unregulated private healthcare industry is coming under increasing scrutiny. India’s public healthcare system is similar to the National Health Service in the UK; an extensive country-wide network free at the point of care, but many public hospitals are under-resourced and overstretched leading to poor patient care. So, everybody who can afford it turns to the booming private sector.
But it is not uncommon for doctors and the corporate-style hospitals to be accused of performing unnecessary surgical procedures, getting kickbacks for referrals or ordering investigations just to make money. Now industry insiders and activists are demanding much greater transparency in the way private doctors and hospitals treat their patients. Suhail Haleem has been finding out more.

Prostate and Breast Cancer Link
New research suggests that a woman’s risk of breast cancer may be linked to a family history of prostate cancer in her close male relatives. It is a big study published in the journal Cancer, which followed nearly 80,000 women for up to 20 years to see if they developed breast cancer, and to document their family history of cancers. Epidemiologist Dr Jennifer Beebe-Dimmer, from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, USA, speaks to Health Check about the results.

(Photo: Hospital ward round. Credit: George Freston/Getty Images)