All Opinion/columnist articles – Page 33
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HSJ KnowledgeCan consortia bear the burden?
I guess most chief executive colleagues are reflecting on what “their NHS” will look like in the future. But it is not just personal futures that need forward planning.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: welcome, belatedly, to austerity
Worried how your organisation will cope with the coming real terms cut in its spending power? Well, don’t be. By the time you read this, it will already have survived its first year of it.
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CommentHakin rejects 'disappointing' reform criticisms
Dame Barbara Hakin, a GP of 20 years and the woman charged by the government with developing consortium commissioning, is growing irritated by alleged misinformation about the NHS reforms, as HSJ’s Dave West finds out.
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CommentHealth and wellbeing needs to remain a local responsibility
Early formation of health and wellbeing boards can quickly reduce wasted effort and result in clear strategic oversight of health issues - but they need to stay free from too much Whitehall interference, as Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council chief executive Graham Burgess explains.
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CommentUniting health and social care to give dementia patients improved services
Projections that the number of people with dementia could double in 30 years will worry a health service that is already failing to adequately support patients with dementia. But making important changes to unite health and social care services could dramatically improve the quality of dementia care, writes Institute of ...
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CommentCally Bann: is life imitating art in La La land?
La La’s Teletubby house has many potential uses: as long as they remain over the hills and far far away.
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Comment
Community action in the NHS is quietly building the Big Society
Mention the Big Society now in the voluntary sector and you are likely to be met with stony gazes. The prime minister’s relaunch of what he describes as his mission in politics will struggle to convince a sector facing the loss of £1.2bn in public funding from April.
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CommentCan GPs become agents of change, or will they remain gatekeepers?
In my forthcoming book on the NHS and reform, I have devoted a chapter to trying to answer the question of whether GPs can move from gatekeepers to change agents. Andrew Lansley’s reforms pose the same question along with others – do a sufficient number of them want to make ...
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CommentYour humble servant: the spectre of Stalin looms over year end
It’s difficult to make end of financial year decisions when pain aligns so closely with pleasure.
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CommentWhat will the private sector do with failed hospitals?
The setting of a final deadline for NHS trusts to apply for foundation status is certainly focusing minds and starting to move long-postponed jobs out of the “too hard” tray, but the unpalatable truth is that some trusts are not going to make it by the drop-dead date of 1 ...
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CommentWhat do we really care about in the NHS?
While there are plenty of people who care about making the system work, in striving for improved access and technical excellence we seem to have stopped caring for the whole person. So what is it we really care about?
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Comment'There are no winners while there is 'them and us' tribalism in the NHS'
“Them and us”. All too often an off-hand remark and the death knell of a beautiful conversation, usually with the word “tariff” thrown in.
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CommentMichael White: Lansley's cloudy vision blurs the clear NHS reality
Watching the drama of health reform debate week after week, I sometimes think of a clever young Tory think tanker called Danny Kruger. Remember him?In 2005 Danny was forced to stand down as his party’s candidate to fight Tony Blair in Sedgefield because he had been heard promising “a period ...
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Comment'Without a firm battle plan, consortia might find themselves neither here nor there'
The grand old health secretary risks getting the new consortia stuck on the hill, unless a change in strategy to push them higher up the slope of success is attempted.
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CommentEffective regulation needs the right touch, at the right time
The chief executive of a troubled NHS trust recently remarked to me: “The problem was, we thought we worked for the regulators, not for our patients.”
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CommentNoel Plumridge: feeling the squeeze
Dupuytren’s contracture is a condition that causes fingers to bend towards the palm. Named after the French surgeon who first described the condition in 1834, it mainly affects men - a reported one in five men aged over 60 - and is most prevalent among people of northern European descent.
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Blogs
Putting the trust in technology
The health service has a reputation – though perhaps not entirely warranted – for looking fondly to the past, particularly at times of great change.
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HSJ Knowledge'Will community services boil down to "any willing price"?'
At a recent senior company team meeting, I was discussing the changes envisaged in the Health and Social Care Bill and raised the notion about writing this article and calling it “any willing price”.
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CommentCan value-based drug pricing deliver a 'postcode lottery' alternative?
Value-based drug pricing is meant to reduce the postcode lottery but could end up achieving the opposite.
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CommentAndrew Dillon: the new mission for NICE
The white paper Liberating the NHS and the Health Bill currently going through Parliament describe a radically new architecture for the NHS together with a new, outcomes based approach to driving improvements in care.