External contributors – Page 257
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Comment
Lesley Wright on lean thinking and respecting NHS staff
Managers and clinical staff interested in lean healthcare often stall at the same point: 'We want to adopt lean thinking but want to call it something else. 'Lean' is hard to sell to our staff.'
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Comment
Angela Greatley on help for released prisoners
Every year, more than 80,000 people end prison sentences in the UK. Most have a complex mix of mental health problems alongside drug or alcohol addictions and a myriad of other difficulties to face.
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Your Humble Servant: clinician questions
To: Don Wise, chief executiveFrom: Paul Servant, assistant chief executiveRe: How hard can it be?
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Comment
Media Watch: public sector salaries
Another day, another sackload of filthy dollars for the bloated plutocrats who make up the public sector workforce, according to The Daily Telegraph.
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Comment
Frank Atherton on the financial crisis and public health
The health and well-being of communities and individuals in the UK will not be immune from the effects of the evolving economic downturn in which we are now enmeshed.
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Michael White on the NHS budget
I don't think I heard the word 'NHS' more than once during the chancellor's emergency budget - for that is what it was - on Monday.
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Mark Hackett on healthcare and customer confidence
Some years ago our commissioners grasped the reality of market dynamics and sought to break traditional monopolies in healthcare provision. Cue the local opening of one of the country's largest independent sector treatment centres.
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Comment
Complex public health problems need social innovation
The North West has made great strides in improving services but with complex problems persisting it will also take a process of social innovation to find creative solutions
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Paul Stanton on steering the NHS through financial crisis
The credit crunch and the consequent financial turmoil it has unleashed is a global phenomenon. For those who govern NHS organisations, whether as commissioners or providers, the mantra 'think global, act local' has never been more pertinent.
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Comment
Steve Feast on leading care across boundaries
Achieving world class outcomes for patients challenges clinicians to ensure all parts of care pathways operate effectively and co-operatively.
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Andrew Jones on healthcare in a recession
We might not officially be in recession, but few would doubt the inevitability of a second quarter of negative growth being confirmed by the Office for National Statistics.
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Ali Mohammed on NHS professions of the future
One of the issues that the good and the great are pondering is the role of different professions in the future.
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Comment
Keith Pearson on the NHS constitution consultation
Sitting as a member of the NHS constitutional advisory forum for the past four months, I found myself among an august body of people, all with a passion to drive forward one of the most significant developments in NHS history.
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Comment
Griffiths report could have freed NHS from politics
The Griffiths report could have created the utopian ideal of an NHS buffered from political meddling, but it was not to be.
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Comment
Simon Stevens on Barack Obama's first steps
So what does Barack Obama's election victory mean for the future of the US health system? And what lessons, if any, are US policy makers likely to derive from recent NHS reforms?
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Comment
Media Watch: healthy towns
'It won't work round here,' a resident of one of the Department of Health's newly designated Healthy Towns predicted to The Times.
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Comment
Michael White on euthanasia
Buried away in a Commons debate the other day was a remark that could apply to the unhealthy state of the economy and assorted remedies to cure it, including a large injection of job-boosting cash into the NHS capital building programme.
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Comment
Laura Thomas on information prescriptions
By the end of 2008, people with long-term conditions should leave GP surgeries and hospitals clutching not one prescription but two: one for their medicines and another for the information and support they need.
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Comment
John Coakley on NHS targets
Most clinicians hate targets and view them as something that obstructs clinical care. However, it seems they have worked.
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Comment
Benjamin Ellis on clinician-manager rivalries
A few years ago, a doctor friend told me of a revelation she had had after attending a lecture on clinical nutrition. 'You see,' she said, 'I'd never really thought of calories as something you needed in order to survive - I'd spent my whole life trying to avoid them.'