All articles by End Game – Page 10
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Blogs
A certain amount of sweat is fine
It’s National Orgasm Day! NHS Choices excitedly informed us via their Twitter feed.The tweet, to their 84,600 followers, also included a link to the NHS Choices good sex guide. Who knew everyone’s favourite NHS website had taken an interest in improving the nation’s lovemaking?“Even the most contented lovers can have ...
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Blogs
Publicity hunt
Health minister Dan Poulter used the launch of the NHS’s procurement strategy this week to urge the service to take note of the daytime television show Bargain Hunt.Dr Dan name-checked perma-tanned presenter David Dickinson, who left the show 10 years ago, but would have been the presenter when the minister ...
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Blogs
Out of the office
To quote Toots and the Maytals, it’s “time tough” in the NHS these days.But even bearing that in mind, End Game received a particularly sobering response to a freedom of information request showing just how far efficiency savings had gone at one Merseyside trust.It wasn’t so much the response itself ...
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Blogs
Basildon babe
Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals Foundation Trust correctly identified the national media’s buttock clenchingly embarrassing over-coverage of the royal birth was a public relations open goal par excellence.Pretty much any old tosh parped out by hospital spinners including the words “royal” and “baby” was guaranteed to be handed to an ...
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Blogs
Known unknowns
Massive End Game appreciation goes to South Warwickshire Clinical Commissioning Group, for this beautifully worded admission of ignorance in a recent finance report: “The complexity of the issues involved, and the quality and paucity of data available mean that it is presently not possible to confidently assert that the CCG ...
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Blogs
Beat the heat with eaty treat
Take it from End Game, there’s nothing more frustrating for a journalist than getting an interesting story with an insufficient level of detail, requiring numerous follow up calls to request extra information.So we heartily thank North Middlesex University Hospital for supplying us with all the facts in a recent press ...
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Blogs
Monitor on the move
Word reaches End Game that everyone’s favourite NHS economic regulator is vacating its Westminster premises.Apparently Monitor is moving everyone out of their Matthew Parker Street headquarters and into its other central London abode in Waterloo.That leaves a prime bit of central London office space empty - but this situation will ...
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Blogs
The gilded bandwagon
When the news of the royal contractions was announced, End Game joined in the celebrations.This wasn’t because we were looking forward to hours, if not days, of tedious fact-free rolling news reports, but because we knew that NHS public relations people will have spent the past few months preparing tenuous ...
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Blogs
Summer perils
We despaired for so long because the sun refused to appear. Now summer’s here it’s apparent that we’d forgotten the dangers of heat waves.End Game was thinking about leaving the office and heading home, and maybe taking the children for a trip around the sun-drenched garden on the ride-on mower, ...
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Blogs
A new lobbying scandal?
No one can doubt Tory MP, health committee member and former GP Sarah Wollaston’s seriousness.It might not even be too far say she is the parliamentarian most respected by the NHS.No-one would doubt the seriousness of her stance on plain packaging for tobacco, a policy put on a backburner last ...
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Blogs
The policy doctor
Many health policy fans noticed that details of a government review recommending the banning of packed lunches for schoolchildren were published on the same day that the Department of Health decided that actually plain packaging for tobacco products was a terrible idea.End Game was among those confused as to what ...
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Blogs
Pure froth
“Imagine a world where our health literacy matched our coffee literacy.” So tweeted Johnny Marshall, the NHS Confederation policy director and all round jolly good egg, linking to piece he’d written for the BBC.The gist of Mr Marshall’s argument was that patients should be treated more like customers and if ...
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Blogs
Circularity: the seventh C
The first two elements on NHS England’s list of essential elements of compassionate care, featured on a press release commemorating the service’s 65th birthday, bowled End Game over.They are (wait for it!): care and compassion.“Care, Compassion, Competence, Communication, Courage and Commitment, are values essential to compassionate care,” says the document.End ...
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Blogs
The cuisine quality commission
A recent Care Quality Commission investigation has uncovered some unsettling truths about life in one north eastern town.Patients told the CQC that at Auckland Park Hospital, “They make an excellent meal here; [the] best in town”.End Game sympathies go to restaurant-goers in Bishop Auckland.
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Blogs
Tredinnick's pet subject
When the health select committee member and pro-homeopathy campaigner David Tredinnick, prefaces a question with “this may sound a little bit odd”, you know you’re in for a treat.Mr Tredinnick somehow managed steer several minutes of a recent committee evidence session, which was supposed to be about the implementation of ...
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Blogs
Incendiary reporting
“SEND FIREMEN ON 999 CALLS INSTEAD OF AMBULANCES,” bellowed a Daily Mail headline.It was in reference to NHS England chief executive Sir David Nicholson’s recent Commons health select committee appearance in which he said he had given thought to the idea of the fire service “supporting paramedics”.A very boring quote ...
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Blogs
There was a light...
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has revealed that he used to really like The Smiths, but has gone off them a bit in recent years.In a weirdly lengthy interview with the Independent (one would think his fomulation of a new top-down reorganisation of the health and care service would be ...
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Blogs
Wicked whispers
End Game has been handed a set of emails showing how Department of Health flacks handled(ish) one of the more recent NHS crises.They made interesting reading, considering how divorced from each other NHS England and the Department of Health are supposed to be post-liberation of the NHS.In one, a Richmond ...
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Blogs
Chirpy man
It seems the NHS has been freed from central control to such an extent that it now occupies a mythical realm beyond the constraints of rational thought.It is only natural, post liberation, that we all think carefully about what everyone’s job actually is these days.But health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s deliberations ...
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Blogs
Grabbing the headlines
It was refreshing to see the Foundation Trust Network launching a staunch defence of the Care Quality Commission, amid allegations the regulator was not fit for purpose in the wake of the “cover up” scandal.Lesser interest groups might have reached for the popcorn, sat back and watched as the quality ...