Comment archive – Page 421
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Leader
Pick and mix accounting clouds surplus predictions
The NHS year-end surplus may not be quite as easy to predict as you might think.
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Leader
No amount of health funding will be an antidote to poverty
As the political parties mobilise for the conference season it is tempting to believe there is broad consensus about the future of the NHS. But three debates that go to its heart are raging.
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Comment
Your Humble Servant on the NHS Constitution
To: Don Wise, chief executiveFrom: Paul Servant, assistant chief executiveRe: Constipated Constitution
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Comment
Media Watch: NHS branding
What price clarity? About £2m reckons London's Evening Standard. That is the price tag it totted up for primary care trusts abandoning their old titles in favour of the simpler 'NHS' brand.
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Comment
Michael White on economic populism
Off the Calais ferry and straight back into the political melee this week, I certainly didn't feel the quiet August break had done much for Gordon Brown's government's prospects of recovery.
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Comment
Malcolm Lowe-Lauri on his last column
This will be my last column. While working in London I could sustain the roles of foundation trust chief executive, a member of various national boards, HSJ columnist and playing in my band.
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Comment
Kevin Fickenscher on collaborative IT leadership
When the NHS was created 60 years ago, no-one could have imagined the groundbreaking work the service does today, or even the role technology plays in enabling clinicians to deliver care.
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Mark Goldman on raising the NHS bar
It's official. The NHS provides the most equitable healthcare anywhere in the world. But there are 18 countries whose citizens have better outcomes following cancer treatment than we do.
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Comment
Helen Bevan on NHS finance directors
As an NHS improvement leader I work with many staff groups. One group that was barely on my radar a year ago, but with which I now work with regularly, is NHS finance leaders.
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Comment
Julia Tybura on visualising world class commissioning
Watching the Olympic women's weightlifting - yes, I should get out more - I was struck by the sheer focus of a Chinese woman who won gold.
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Comment
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.
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Leader
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 finance initiative debts to consider hiving off their estate to charities.
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Leader
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.
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Comment
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.
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Comment
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.
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Comment
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.
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Comment
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
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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.
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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.
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Comment
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.