All Health Service Journal articles in Opinion – Page 30
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Comment
Patient involvement
A current exemplar of the way the government misjudges citizen engagement is the proposal to introduce LINks and abolish Patient and Public Involvement Forums.
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Comment
Predicting unplanned admissions
Your article 'Long Term Conditions: Predicting the Future' (2 November 2006) showed the value of measuring the risk of patients experiencing unplanned admissions to hospital, and I thought it would be helpful to highlight other work that is underway
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News
Public health and organisational reform
Professor David J Hunter and Jeffrie Strang story on public health and organisation reform was an excellent, balanced article with a clear conclusion - I couldn't agree more on the need for a moratorium onorganisational reform, and its negative impact on public health, particularly public mental health, my area of ...
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News
Laura Donnelly on the spirit of debate
Bananarama's advice may have been aimed at the boudoir rather than the boardroom, but it could certainly be applied to organisations seeking to engage communities and staff in service change.
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Comment
Rights and responsibilities is the issue on the Cabinet table
The government believes it has to reassert its power to make policy in response to the Brown-Blair faction-fighting of the autumn. Public services is one of six policy areas under debate (the others include the role of the state, crime and security) and the first to arrive on the Cabinet ...
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News
Back to the ward: back-to-front thinking
Even when financial pressure is being felt so heavily up and down the country, it still seems odd that some trusts are asking senior nurses (in at least one case, at director level) to go back to the wards to help out on a regular basis. Read more >>
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Comment
Hilary Thomas on being half-way through radiotherapy
Soon I can put radiotherapy and my emotional reaction to it behind me and enjoy Harry Hill's advice: 'My auntie used to say, what you can't see won't hurt you. She died of radiation poisoning'
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Comment
Professor David J Hunter and Jeffrie Strang on public health and organisational reform
The justification for the current reorganisation of strategic health authorities and primary care trusts is to strengthen the commissioning function of PCTs and to save £250m in management costs. But are these good enough reasons and will the mergers create a period of stasis? ...
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Comment
Clinical governance
While I agree with using data for decision making (Click here to read the full story), for this to happen effectively we need greater management leverage of clinical governance.
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Comment
Your Humble Servant: non-executive joy
‘As for selection processes, we still can’t fathom them. It used to be so simple: either failed politicians found a way to boost their pension or successful ones got their wives out of the way a few days a month’.
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Comment
Merit awards
Dr Giles Croft's lament about the inaccuracy of Hospital Episode Statistics and their inappropriateness as a means of managing the performance of doctors (HSJ, November 2nd) raises the nice issue of why there are some problems with HES accuracy. Surely such inaccuracies are the product of failures by clinicians to ...
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Comment
Lean thinking
While there is evidence supporting a case management approach to the care of patients in the greatest need of healthcare, this has been less convincing than some seem to believe. Also, the creation of structures that are separate from general practice is both counter-intuitive and seems to run contrary to ...
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News
'Emotional blackmail' of nursing staff
I do not have a problem with teamwork and continuing part-time care. However, this excuse is trotted out every time money has to be saved. It's a form of emotional blackmail of already hard-pressed nursing staff.
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News
Minister puts onus on trusts to negotiate unbundled tariff
Primary care and acute trusts need to negotiate their own ways to unbundle the payment by results tariff, health minister Lord Warner said as he launched the 'road test' of next year's tariff.
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Comment
Managing a merger? Don't lose the plot
A new era of NHS mergers is upon us. But lessons from the business world show that they can be painful and uncomfortable. Steve Downing outlines a theatrical route to tackling the problems
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News
Burden of unbundling the tariff falls on quality of local data
This week's 'road testing' of the payment by results tariff for 2007-08 will, the Department of Health hopes, result in considerably less noise than the late and broken one released in January. The DoH says it is not looking for any comment or complaint about what the tariff should or ...
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Comment
Reform and instability
'Why instability is inevitable' - Simon Stevens' article on the NHS and the J curve (page 19, 19 October) reminded me of a classic false syllogism: 'It always gets worse before it gets better.It certainly is getting worse. Therefore it will get better.'
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Comment
Privacy in hospitals
I have always had a problem with issues of privacy in acute hospitals. I started my career as a clinical psychologist working with people with learning disabilities and being very aware that I was going into people's homes - even when they were in NHS care.
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Comment
Equality and recruitment
The NHS has a bad reputation when it comes to equality of opportunity. Historically it was slow to move from a colourblind approach to race, and many health organisations only introduced equal opportunity polices when they were required to by legislation.