All Comment articles – Page 319

  • Comment

    Listen and learn: keys to good commissioning

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    How does accountability to patients and the public fit into the commissioning framework, asks David Colin-Thome. Below, Tim Gilling outlines the 10 areas essential to effective scrutiny

  • Comment

    Healthcare inspection comes under scrutiny of its own

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    'Numbers do not impart wisdom in themselves, you have to learn how to select and use them'

  • Comment

    Clinicians and trust

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    Katzenbach is close (Anna Donald, Opinion, 8th March), but Onora O' Neill is closer. Her Reith lectures in 2002, 'A Question of Trust', pointed not to a crisis of trust but to a pervading culture of suspicion, directed particularly at the professions.

  • Comment

    Malcolm Lowe-Lauri on clinical engagement

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    'A meeting of minds gets enormous impetus when the fog of data is converted into information'

  • Comment

    Sophia Christie on lessons from Sweden

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    One of the most distinctive characteristics of NHS trusts' work with US company Kaiser Permanente is also one of the least commented upon. Kaiser Health Plan is an insurance company in an exclusive partnership with the Permanente Medical Group, run as a profit share company for the participating partner doctors.

  • Comment

    Sophia Christie on national and local tensions

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    Despite a bad press, national targets have challenged our complacency about poor health in poor people and poor services to support them.

  • Comment

    Sophia Christie on telling our story

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    'Formal public meetings only ever engage the sort of people who like attending formal public meetings'

  • Comment

    Sophia Christie on health and employment

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    The publication of the Commissioning framework for health and well being is a welcome reminder that 13 months ago the government published white paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say. For many of us it is a long-awaited statement about the future direction for the 90 per cent of NHS ...

  • Comment

    Confessions of an NHS chief executive

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    'I do not follow rhyme or reason, only the secretary of state'

  • Comment

    Media watch: hospital phone charges

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    Those unlucky enough to spend Easter in hospital also had the misfortune of paying a whopping 26p per minute if they wished to call their loved ones. Not unexpectedly the tabloids and broadsheets were up in arms last week as they bemoaned the 160 per cent increase in hospital call ...

  • Comment

    Michael White: change in the NHS

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    We were standing on the edge of my local swimming pool discussing the inevitability of change when a fellow wrinklie walked past, saying: 'Don't talk to me about change. I work for the NHS and whenever I hear that word I just switch off.'

  • Comment

    Simon Stevens on the case for independence

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    It now seems likely that, regardless of political party, our next prime minister will toy with some version of 'independence' for the NHS. Independence for the Bank of England is seen as one of the government's more important reforms, so an NHS parallel could resonate. And shadow health secretary Andrew ...

  • Comment

    Day case rates

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    Marc Farr says day-case rates over the last three years have shown little sign of improvement

  • Comment

    Unjust social care funding

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    'One in four people over the age of 85 in Oxfordshire are in receipt of a high cost package of care'

  • Comment

    Sophia Christie on why tenders need loving care

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    Community foundation trusts reproduce the organisations we disbanded five years ago

  • Comment

    Laura Donnelly on primary care leaders

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    One argument is that new strategic health authority chief executives, keen to assert authority and be seen to do so, are indulging in an exercise otherwise known as 'don't think much of yours?'

  • Comment

    Sophia Christie on primary care

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    'The challenge of the last three years has been demand management. The focus for the next two years must be a considered challenge to activity attribution.'

  • Comment

    Media Watch: earnings cap

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    So ministers have 'blundered' again, according to London's Evening Standard. This time it is because they have failed to cap doctors' earnings.

  • Comment

    Media Watch: earnings cap

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    So ministers have 'blundered' again, according to London's Evening Standard. This time it is because they have failed to cap doctors' earnings.

  • Comment

    Cliff Prior profile: 'The only thing you can't predict is where it will go'

    2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

    In his new job heading a group of not-for-profit organisations, former Rethink chief executive Cliff Prior will have a key role in reshaping community services. But first he has to explain what it is all about