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Health Service Journal
4 September 2008

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  • £1.75bn NHS surplus predicted

    The NHS is set to finish this financial year with a £1.75bn surplus. The projection, based on estimates from the three months since April, is equivalent to just over 2 per cent of NHS revenue funding this year.

  • Academia and the NHS - bridging the gap

    Mabel Simms and Steven Shackleford explain how healthcare providers are building stronger relationships with the universities that train their workforce

  • Accountancy firms win PCT board roles

    Three of the 'big four' accountancy firms have been selected to improve primary care trust boards' skills.KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young are all leading consortiums that have made successful bids to be on the Department of Health's new PCT board development framework.

  • Adolescent services: smells like teen spirit

    The teenage years are not the easiest: testing boundaries, asserting your independence and taking risks - and this age group often falls between child and adult healthcare. Claire Laurent reports on moves to target services for young people's needs

  • Amanda Doyle on the trouble with patient choice

    Lord Darzi, in his next stage review, talks a lot about choice, and why not? Greater choice of healthcare provider is, undoubtedly, a good thing.

  • Andrew Jones on achieving quality care

    Piloting the NHS towards quality requires robust regulation and inspection, and the DH has already set up overlapping organisations to provide this, presumably with a thinly spread budget. But if Lord Darzi's plan is to be accomplished, it will require action rather than rhetoric, and action requires funding.

  • Angela Greatley on tackling social exclusion

    There is a group of people who are chronically excluded from housing, work, relationships and the kinds of activity most people aspire to in 21st century Britain. They exhibit the most complex problems but they can be the most excluded from the very help they need.

  • Anti-government protests in Swaziland

    Today the monotony of our working day was broken by anti-government protests outside the office window. The odd pop of tear gas, and people fleeing through the trees that fill the open land between ministry buildings.

  • Audit sample 'was misleading'

    Your point that up to £1bn of bills sent by trusts to primary care trusts could be incorrect is misleading.

  • Bill Moyes keen to see teaching foundations

    Monitor executive chair Bill Moyes is urging more teaching hospitals to become foundation trusts in 2009.

  • Building skills in the healthcare workforce

    Skills for Health offers a range of services to healthcare leaders to improve the quality of their workforce's skills. John Rogers offers guidance on the tools available

  • Carbon strategy proposes tough target

    The draft carbon reduction strategy for the NHS in England proposes a more stringent carbon target than the one mentioned in your article: zero-carbon hospit

  • Cervical cancer immunisation plans may exclude Muslim girls

    Muslim girls will be excluded from a national vaccination scheme against cervical cancer because it clashes with the holy month of Ramadan, religious leaders are warning.

  • Chris Dye on learning - online and down the pub

    About six years ago, the Appointments Commission asked chairs and non-executive directors if they would like more communication online. The answer was a resounding 'no'.

  • Conservatives plan to step up councils' role in health

    Public health directors would have to report to local authorities under plans announced by the shadow health secretary last week.

  • Data protection in the NHS - a ticking time bomb?

    The health service's procedures for protecting confidential data are worryingly inadequate, argue Sven Putnis and Andrew Bircher

  • Doctors' memory sticks threaten data security

    Hospital doctors are carrying 'hundreds of thousands of kilobytes' of sensitive and identifiable patient information around on memory sticks with no security protection, a survey has found.

  • Drug addiction services hit by unrealistic targets

    Unrealistic targets to get more drug addicts into treatment are causing the quality of services to plummet, psychiatrists are warning.

  • Emma Dent on the need for moving help

    In these pressed financial times, with estate agents twiddling their thumbs for lack of activity and thinking of sending their kids up chimneys to help pay the bills, I have struck on a way they can boost business.

  • Enhancing service requires proper funding

    I must respond to Sophia Christie's column. The days of the GP doing an ever-expanding range of tasks for the same money are gone. Movement from secondary to primary care must be accompanied by altered funding flows

  • Fujitsu may bring £700m action over IT deal

    The Department of Health has refused to comment on reports that former national IT programme contractor Fujitsu is considering suing over the business it lost when its contract was terminated in March.

  • Gathering equality data in the health service

    Data on local service users plays a key role in shaping public health strategies and planning services that meet the needs of the community. Helen Bunter and Debra Canning examine how one PCT is improving data collection

  • Gay Lee on the social care debate

    Nurses and social workers know it is impossible to tell where social care ends and healthcare begins. Yet they waste time, effort and money trying to prise them apart - because government policy says they must.

  • Get happy: the secret to a healthy old age

    There is clear evidence older people benefit from preventive healthcare. For the fulfilled old age that people want, services must spot depression early and support good diet and mobility

  • Government to underwrite hospital trusts' assets

    The government is to underwrite hospital trusts' assets to prevent them going bust and ending up in court.HSJ has learned that the Department of Health is to issue a consultation paper this month that rules out insolvency for trusts that are failing financially.

  • HSJ bloggers promise the insider's view

    This week this website plunges into the blogosphere. Five readers are charting their highs and lows, frustrations and triumphs working in the health service.

  • Hull trust buys Nuffield hospital to save money

    Hulland East Yorkshire Hospitals trust has bought a private Nuffield hospital to avoid contracting out services to the independent sector.

  • It's back to the kennel for NICE

    So, NICE are to force trusts to provide treatment for macular degeneration following effective lobbying. That's going to be interesting, isn't it?

  • Jenny Rogers on forced fun

    I have a memory: my one-year-old child is squatting in the kitchen looking a touch restless. Feeling it my maternal duty to play, I approach with a synthetic 'let's-have-fun' voice.

  • John Cochran on healers, leaders and partners

    Lord Darzi's review singles out Kaiser Permanente in the US as an example of an organisation with strong clinical leadership and says the NHS can learn from its 'practitioner, partner, leader' model. Permanente Federation director John Cochran explains

  • Lansley boosts councils' role in public health

    Public health directors would have to report to local authorities under plans announced by the shadow health secretary last week.Andrew Lansley told an audience at the think tank Reform that the Conservatives now envisaged councils having an even greater role in improving public health.

  • Lap dog Lansley does public health

    As Diddy Dave Cameron put it so eloquently, if you've got a dog then why learn to bark yourself? Particularly if your dog is Lap Dog Lansley. There's nothing Lap Dog likes more than a good bark.

  • Large variations in quality of health regulation

    Large variations in how much health regulators protect the public have been exposed in annual performance reviews.

  • London polyclinics to use 'federated' model

    None of London's first wave of controversial polyclinics will deliver all its services from a single new standalone building.

  • Media Watch: public health drive

    Andrew Lansley argued last week that businesses would sign up to the public health drive as long as they weren't subject to excessive regulation.

  • Michael White on public health policy

    Andrew Lansley seems to have been the first health politico to get off the beach and back in hot water this summer with that 'no excuses, no nannying' speech he made to the pro-market Reform think tank.

  • NHS North East publishes workforce plans

    The first major regional workforce proposals published since the next stage review appear to confirm the strong role given to strategic health authorities.NHS North East is creating a new regional-level organisation called NHS Education North East.

  • NHS work experience: a crucial stepping stone

    In the second in our series of work experience diaries, we follow Lyndon, who spent a week at Southampton General Hospital two years ago

  • Patient involvement: parlez-vous health?

    Willingness to learn a few foreign phrases is helping a PCT get closer to its minority communities. Lynne Greenwood reports

  • Paul Jennings on the commissioner-provider split

    It is just over two years since we began separating the commissioning and provider arms in Walsall teaching primary care trust.

  • PCTs press for south London hospitals shake-up

    Primary care trusts have warned that delaying the proposed reconfiguration of hospitals in south east London could push services to breaking point.

  • PFI plan could keep debts off NHS trusts' balance sheets

    NHS trusts may hand their private finance initiative hospitals over to specially created charities to avoid reporting PFI debts on their balance sheets, HSJ has learned.The controversial plans would involve trusts ceding control of the hospitals to a third party.

  • Pricing tariffs would reduce coding errors

    A simple device could improve clinical coding and costing at a stroke: all providers should put the cost of the patient episode (provisional if necessary) with the clinical discharge summary letter to the GP as t

  • Putting the patient at the centre

    Personal budgets are nothing more complicated than being clear with people from the outset about how much money is available to meet their level of need and allowing them greater choice over how it is spent.

  • Quality measures obscure real picture

    Bank holidays are peak times for out of hours and other urgent health services. In the run-up organisations work hard to plan capacity to ensure that available resources meet demand.

  • Simon Stevens on the top-up payment maze

    The government has committed to answering at some time in the coming weeks a highly awkward dilemma: whether or not to allow NHS patients to make 'top-up' payments to cover treatments the NHS will not fund.

  • The new NHS leadership challenge

    Developing new leaders is a strategic decision not an HR one, argues Chris Roebuck, and line managers should get started right away

  • Top-up payment review highlights NHS bodies' worries

    Responses to the review of co-payments have revealed the extent of uncertainty about the way forward for the NHS on top-ups.

  • Top-ups: experts divided over health's thorniest issue

    Should patients be allowed to top up their care by paying privately for drugs? The question has confounded experts and now the government has an unenviable task in making a final decision. Helen Crump reports

  • Treating children with severe medical problems

    Cases involving the treatment of children with chronic medical problems do not create legal precedents. Tracey Lucas explains why each decision taken by the courts must reflect what is in the child's best interests at the time

  • Trusts survey the wreckage as PFI hospitals begin to crumble

    Arcane accountancy rules are in danger of costing the NHS control of some of its buildings. As HSJ reveals this week, the Treasury's decision to adopt new international accountancy standards is pushing trusts with private fi

  • Welcome to HSJ blogs!

    HSJ Blogs continue to amuse and engage you as they add new posts.To keep updated with each post, simply subscribe to the Blogs RSS feed. It is free.

  • What NHS managers really want to read

    I don't know which I look forward to the most, The Week or The Month. There's nothing like putting your feet up with a good read about the meandering irrelevancies of the senior leadership.

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