All articles by End Game – Page 9
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Blogs
Champagne deception
Ministers’ celebrations to mark the NHS’s 65th birthday earlier this year reflected the tough financial times and were suitably free of razzmatazz. They unveiled some proposals to improve patient care and visited some provider trusts.However, private hospitals are less self-conscious about making a dent in the events budget.End Game was ...
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Blogs
Scandinavian cool
End Game was delighted to receive an email from some agency or another on the state of the technology market on the continent.“Swedish enterprises are cautiously optimistic about their ICT spending”, thundered the headline.End Game was humbled by how utterly reasonable the sentiment was, and wonders whether there might be ...
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Blogs
Mugging for the audience
End Game is something of an NHS England board meeting groupie, and thoroughly enjoys travelling the length and breadth of the country so we can watch our heroes being all transparent and yet eerily in agreement about everything.But apart from total consensus on issues of policy, there is another constant ...
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Blogs
True grit
End Game invites you to join us in celebrating UnitedHealth UK’s first decade of investment in our humble health sector.The British wing of the US health giant entered the UK market in 2003, probably riding a wave of Alan Milburn-inspired optimism that the time had finally come for efficient, forward ...
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Blogs
Celebrating our glorious NHS
Getting the NHS to its 65th birthday without killing it completely would be a cause of celebration for any government, and joining in with the festivities is surely an easy public relations win for ministers.So End Game was delighted to read the response to a parliamentary question asking what exactly ...
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Blogs
Minister for modesty
Dan Poulter, the hirsute-is-too-small-a-word minister, doctor and model, has now been in office for a year.So what has he been up to? We went to his website to check on his achievement map (which regular readers might remember listed seven achievements a few months ago), but found the tool had ...
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Blogs
Letter from America
A hearty End Game standing ovation goes to former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith for bringing incredible personal flair to that most mundane of communiques – the “out of office” email.Here’s what a recent automated response said:“Gone to Chicago that city of hammers, meat, graft, bull, and pork to ...
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Blogs
At last: transparency on NHS IT
David Cameron in October promised to free nurses from endless form-filling by giving them all iPads - £100m of iPads to be exact, which (bearing in mind the government’s success in previous health IT procurements) ought to buy at least 10.The PM’s involvement inevitably raised the interest of journalists who ...
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Blogs
A rich historical legacy
First Richard III’s body was found under a council car park, now Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals Trust has made a sensational discovery of equally historic proportions.End Game was astonished to receive a trust press release explaining how an £8m renovation project at Hull Royal Infirmary led to “a piece ...
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Blogs
PCTs: forgotten forever?
End Game firmly believes that just because primary care trusts were bloodily sacrificed on the altar of clinical commissioning that doesn’t mean they should be forgotten.So we put in a Freedom of Information request to the Department of Health asking how PCTs performed on their final year of quality, innovation ...
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Blogs
Everything you ever wanted to know about John Ashton, and quite a lot more besides
End Game has been enjoying the Twitter account of John Ashton for some months, mainly because it allows us to answer the question “what happens when a senior figure broadcasts whatever is on his mind, without the slightest regard to his personal reputation?”Mr Ashton is president of the Faculty of ...
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Blogs
Working 9 to 5
More evidence arrives that commissioning support units are becoming ever more businessy in their working practices.Greater Manchester CSU sent End Game an email boasting that after just four and a half months of operation they had set up a new website.The site is graced with “a modern, colourful design and ...
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Blogs
For whom the whistle blows
There’s no doubt former United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust chief executive Gary Walker is a controversial figure. However, End Game wonders whether we’ve not fully appreciated the scale of his achievements.Tweeting ahead of a BBC programme he featured in recently, Mr Walker pondered whether “one person’s whistleblower is another’s enemy”. He ...
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Blogs
Kelsey Uncut: Tweet 'n' delete
End Game has been a fan of NHS England’s colourful national director for patients and information Tim Kelsey for some time - and his Twitter account in particular.The latest missives from what we like to think of as “Kelsey Uncut” were fired off after a privacy campaigner raised concerns around ...
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Blogs
FOI exemptions revisited
When not busy writing this page, End Game likes to while away the day composing fiendishly worded freedom of information requests, mainly because the ingenuity so many public organisations display as they find reasons to not respond to them is a joy to behold.So take a bow, Northamptonshire County Council, ...
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Blogs
Hacks are coming: get bustling
Readers may remember a common acquisition for any rebel-without-a-cause teenager was a “comedy” T-shirt proclaiming: “Jesus is coming: look busy”. As a teen, End Game chortled at the wit and wisdom of the slogan. As a know it all student, End Game thought it was hackneyed and naff. It ...
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Blogs
Exalted company
Sir Stephen Bubb, the utterly relentless head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, found himself rubbing shoulders with God Himself when he became the subject of a Today Programme Thought for the Day slot recently.Sir Stephen announced that he was “deeply flattered”, to be featured in such ...
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Blogs
Will the real Sir David please stand up?
Firmly ensconced in his Quarry House office, Sir David has taken up blogging in a bid to become more open and let the people know what’s on his mind.But it seems some meanies out there don’t believe he’s been writing them himself.“This is my latest blog”, his latest blog begins, ...
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Blogs
The corridor of power
A recent visit to Richmond House’s fabled fourth floor corridor of power yielded some fascinating insights into the highest echelons of the Department of Health.Norman Lamb’s office is adorned with traditional depictions of the Norfolk countryside, which Alan Partridge would no doubt approve of.Anna Soubry’s office door carries a sign ...
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Blogs
Momentous CCG success
Commiserations to Thurrock Clinical Commissioning Group, which remains one of the groups with some of the most serious limitations on its freedoms following a summer review of the CCG authorisation process. The categories of its failures – covering its engagement with practices, its constitution, and the skills of those on ...