External contributors – Page 225
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CommentGPs in the driving seat?
It seems GPs are not really up for being put “in the driving seat” of NHS reform.
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Comment‘Labour MPs who call the Osborne way Thatcherism Mk II are not up to speed’
It took less than a week for some vociferous supporters of George Osborne’s £81bn spending cuts experiment to get cold feet about the likely consequences for lower economic growth. The government “cannot cut its way to prosperity”, business leaders warned on Monday.
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Comment'Who will own the NHS?'
Somewhere between this week’s spending review and the parliamentary debates on the Health Bill, we will learn where the real balance of power between the commissioning board and GP consortia will lie.
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Comment'La La is throwing his limited political capital into reshuffling bureaucracy'
It’s all getting rather confusing with La La Lansley. Is he the mild mannered janitor who turns in to Hong Kong Phooey, or is he just the janitor for Stephen Dorrell?
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CommentMedia Watch: digital drive and damaging cuts
After cloth merchant Sir Philip Green got backs up last week with talk of waste, Martha Lane Fox is the latest entrepreneur to try telling public servants how to do their jobs.
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Comment‘Part of “Waiting for Osborne” consisted of Lansley reassuring voters he has GP support’
At a conference the other day I heard an entrepreneurial medic giving a glowing account of a GP led consortium and all the wonderful Lansley style things it is doing for its patients in the South. Oh brave new world!
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Comment'What will a real increase in the NHS budget actually mean?'
The 2010 spending review has announced a real rise each year for NHS funding to 2014-15. However, other spending departments now face a horror show of real cuts in their budgets.
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CommentAn action plan for busting NHS deficits
An action plan is needed now to ensure acute trusts do not run out of money in 2011
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CommentMake the most of your transferable skills
You want to change career, secure a new role, position yourself for a job in a GP consortium or maybe move into a different sector. So you need to know how to identify, present and evidence your transferable skills.
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CommentTake the lead in preventing ill health
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Britain was known as “the sick man of Europe”. Then it related to industrial strife and poor economic performance. Now we are in danger of regaining that mantle, but this time in public health terms.
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CommentCuts, car parks and care records
The media gave a good few pages over to the NHS this week, taking in cuts, car parks and care records, but no obvious mention of the other C word: commissioning.
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CommentWhat was he thinking?
What’s that? Our former health boss, cheerful Alan Johnson, as shadow chancellor and Andy Burnham switched to the education brief, where he has been quick to condemn coalition plans to raise student tuition charges? What was Ed Miliband thinking?
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CommentCompetition could change the face of healthcare
Competition could change the health landscape in the same way it did with gas, electricity and telecoms
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CommentThe power of checklists in the NHS
With the level of change the NHS faces, it is crucial to keep everyone focused and on target.
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CommentMark Britnell: Have foundation trusts realised their potential?
Australian interest in foundation trusts has thrown their achievements into stark relief
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CommentThe right way to form GP consortia
GP commissioning consortia will not be created by guidance notes from the Department of Health. Nor will they be formed by primary care trusts and strategic health authorities suggesting the necessary population size for efficient commissioning.
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Comment'All a bit anodyne these days, what with partnership this and partnership that'
Lansley the Leveller should be saying his prayers, according to the joshing banter and bonhomie around our Joint Consultative Committee table.
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CommentMedia Watch: the Conservative Party conference
Unsurprisingly the health coverage this week was largely concerned with the blue half of the government ahead of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
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Comment'Lansley needs to make the intellectual case for PCT upheaval'
Who caught my attention at the Tory conference this year? Not Andrew Lansley, I think. He had his £164m cancer screening announcement pinched by David Cameron (a PM’s prerogative) and also made a rather lacklustre speech of his own from the platform.
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CommentTeam survival in troubled times
In the NHS’s rush to do more with less there is an inevitable temptation to merge teams, or broaden the remit of existing teams. If clarity of aims - the core requirement for effective team working - is sacrificed, inefficiencies result.