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3 Febuary edition of the Telemedicine Reporter International Edition (PDF) for download thanks to US Tele-Medicine. To be emailed when the next is released email their media dept. |
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| The gist is...If you have a serious comment to make anonymously...email it, don't just post it. |
Truly anonymous comments - where the writer is unknown - are not published unless they are unexceptional.
Comments or articles where the authorship is known but are offered for publication anonymously are considered on their merits. (Email Steve or Donna in confidence.) There are some circumstances where it is necessary to be close to a particular situation to be able to throw light on it but to write about it publicly would jeopardise the author's position. In that case, the decision to publish an item anonymously hinges on the question of whether or not it is informed opinion that will add insight to, or might start, a debate on a particular topic.
Unsubstantiated allegations of illegal behaviour or substandard products, for example, would not be posted unless they could be independently verified, in which case we would probably publish them ourselves.
Just because a post, article or comment, etc. is published on Telecare Aware readers cannot and should not infer that the editors agree with the author, anonymous or not.
Steve Hards
Donna Cusano
Editors
steve.hards@telecareaware.com
donna.cusano@telecareaware.com
Telecare Soapbox: When is a healthcare company a healthcare company? |
| Tuesday, 10 March 2009 10:22 |
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Steve Hards asks "What questions should telehealth commissioners be asking suppliers?" Now that the laughter in the UK's telecare/teleheath community over Tunstall's name change in the UK to 'Tunstall Healthcare' has subsided into a rather nervous giggle, it's an appropriate time to raise the question of what criteria does a company have to meet to be recognised as a healthcare company? To qualify, does a company have to undertake healthcare as the public would understand it, i.e. providing the services of doctors, nurses or other healthcare professionals? Or can it just employ a nurse as an adviser? What if a company has been supplying say, bedding, or computers, to hospitals? Or is it enough for a company to repeat "healthcare, healthcare, healthcare" mantra-like, in the hope of hypnotising its sales prospects? Well, of course, these are rhetorical questions since the answer is, as Lewis Carroll put into the mouth of Humpty Dumpty in Alice through the looking-glass, "When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." However, as the potential size of the telehealth market world-wide is attracting attention from all sorts of companies, the question is whether commissioners of telehealth services understand that they will need to probe the healthcare credentials of the companies they are dealing with. Perhaps readers would like to suggest questions that commissioners should be asking. |
