500 episodes listed below
Medical news with system-level consequences.
Medicine and Science from The BMJ is a measured weekly briefing on health systems, medical evidence, and the politics that shape clinical care. Its strongest episodes move from a headline to the mechanism underneath, then to the patient, clinician, or service bearing the cost.
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Medicine and Science from The BMJ is a medical news and analysis programme with a strong institutional spine. It follows the pressure lines running through the NHS, public health policy, clinical evidence, and the wider systems that determine whether care can actually be delivered. The style is measured. The questions are direct. Recent episodes have covered the resident doctor strike in England, the new GP contract, the COVID inquiry, medicine shortages, measles outbreaks, breastfeeding support, shisha tobacco cafes, cosmetic procedure harms, wood-burning stove pollution, child poverty, and children living with conflict. The show rarely treats those subjects as isolated stories. It asks what policy changed, who made the decision, what evidence supports it, and where the burden lands. A labour dispute becomes a question about pay, training places, trust, and government pressure. A supply chain story becomes a lesson in oil routes, transport infrastructure, price rises, and the limits of NHS budgets. A cosmetic surgery segment looks past trend language to deaths, regulation, and the strain placed on public services. The public health episodes are similarly concrete. Shisha cafes are discussed through licensing gaps and council visibility. Breastfeeding support is judged against trial evidence and whether an intervention deserves funding. Measles coverage weighs vaccine uptake, mandates, community engagement, and the role of primary care. The show is especially alert to the gap between official reassurance and frontline reality. It does not chase warmth through chatter. Instead, it builds seriousness through careful questioning, named evidence, and conversations with BMJ journalists, clinicians, and policy figures. That makes it best suited to medically literate listeners, researchers, clinicians, health journalists, and policy-minded people who want the machinery of health care explained without being flattened. Some episodes are uncomfortable because the problems are uncomfortable. Patient harm, staff exhaustion, misinformation, pollution, poverty, and the emotional toll of pandemic care are not softened into neutral abstractions. The value lies in that refusal. Medicine and Science from The BMJ gives health news enough time to show its structure, and enough editorial pressure to reveal why the structure matters.
Made for: For clinicians, researchers, health journalists, policy watchers, and medically literate listeners who want careful reporting on evidence, regulation, and NHS pressures. It also suits listeners interested in how public health decisions affect patients and frontline services.
What sets it apart: The show connects clinical evidence to the policy machinery around it, moving from research findings and official decisions to concrete effects on care. Its BMJ newsroom perspective gives it a sharper institutional memory than general medical news shows.
Leading the debate on health to engage, inform, and stimulate doctors, researchers, and other health professionals.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It connects medical evidence to the policies, institutions and working conditions that determine what care can actually deliver.
Medicine and Science from The BMJ treats health as a meeting point of research, public policy and working conditions. Cameron Abassi and Rebecca Coombs lead direct, substantial interviews, while Navjot Lada steps in for conversations on cancer survivorship and differences in…
A breastfeeding trial disappoints; you hear the hard question of what deserves funding next.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A contract dispute that makes workload politics feel immediate.
The new GP contract in English general practice gives the piece its frame, but the real interest lies in the path from policy shift to workload pressure, mistrust, and a profession-wide vote.
A policy-minded look at measles, uptake, and why mandates do not settle the problem.
This episode treats measles as an immediate public-health issue rather than a distant warning, moving from the Americas to London with a clear sense of urgency.
Cancer survivorship and autism diagnosis land more clearly when the focus stays on care, evidence, and how diagnosis actually happens.
Cancer survivorship is treated as an ongoing chronic-care issue rather than a clean endpoint, which gives the discussion more weight than a routine medical summary.
A negative breastfeeding trial and loose shisha regulation reveal two public-health blind spots.
Public health is often most telling when a sensible intervention disappoints, or when a familiar product slips past the rules designed to manage risk.
A resident doctors' pay dispute becomes a wider argument about burnout, illness, and what the NHS is expected to carry.
Resident doctors' pay opens onto a bigger health question in this BMJ interview: what happens when the economy that funds the NHS also leaves people too unwell to work?
Celebrity headlines, translated into practical health literacy.
Reported stories of responsibility and its consequences.
Researchers, doctors and coaches, translated into everyday health stakes.
Kim Stanley Robinson discusses his book Ministry for the Future and the moral and practical challenges of solving the climate crisis.
The BMJ interviews economist Richard Murphy about the junior doctors' pay dispute in the UK.
This episode of the Medicine and Science Podcast from The BMJ covers two public health topics.
Medicine and Science from The BMJ examines the 15th resident-doctor strike in England, including the cancelled 1,000 accelerated training places and Wes Streeting's refusal to rule out restricting doctors' right to strike.
Duncan Jarvis examines Baroness Hallett's third UK COVID-19 inquiry report with Kevin Fong, who says healthcare systems came close to collapse and remain measurably younger and less experienced after major NHS staff departures.
Duncan Jarvis opens The BMJ's Medicine and Science podcast with the Iran conflict and the Strait of Hormuz closure, which are straining the global medical supply chains behind drugs and devices.
The Department of Health imposes a new GP contract.
Measles is back in the news again.
Navjot Lada opens the episode with cancer care in the UK and the pressure to improve NHS outcomes.
Economist Richard Murphy discusses the merits of junior doctors' pay claims and broader economic issues affecting the NHS.