All articles by Sally Gainsbury – Page 3
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CommentSally Gainsbury: economic peace and goodwill, or Armageddon?
Perhaps it is just seasonal religiosity, but it is starting to look as though 2012 will see some significant battles between the NHS’s competing spiritual forces.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: shifting the goalposts on NHS spending
One of the more intriguing lines in last week’s NHS operating framework is about how primary care trust recurrent allocations for 2012-13 will be reviewed in the light of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s inflation forecast.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: just how much does the NHS cost?
How much does the NHS cost? It is a surprisingly philosophical question as the answer depends on whether or not you believe foundation and NHS trusts exist.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: pain for providers - and the poor
It’s the time of year when minds turn to the contents of the next operating framework – currently scheduled for publication on 24 November.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: councils face a rude awakening
I spent a day and a half last week listening to council executives talking about their hopes and fears for the new roles due to be bestowed on them by the Health Bill.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: in theory, the reality could be even worse
Let us start, as we hacks are so fond of doing, with the bad news. The Department of Health’s first quarterly report for 2011-12 reveals primary care trusts are planning to take savings worth £3.1bn out of acute care this financial year alone.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: as if by magic... How the government conjured up a saving
The great news revealed in the recent NHS 2010-11 accounts is that commissioners spent significantly less on administration that year than was previously assumed.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: the real problems affecting readmissions
How do we keep people out of hospitals – those giant, multimillion-pound “monuments to the failure of preventive medicine”, as one director of public health recently put it?
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CommentSally Gainsbury: PROMs prove McKinsey right - nearly
The latest crop of patient reported outcome measures confirm huge numbers of patients do not feel any better after undergoing one of four measuredprocedures, and quite a few report feeling worse.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: the £2bn secret subsidy
Will the £500m ministers plan to spend each year on not sorting out failing hospitals suffice?
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CommentSally Gainsbury: what price public health?
How much does the NHS spend on public health? It is an important question because, whatever the amount is, it will be hacked off the NHS commissioning budget from 2013-14 onwards and passed over to those hungry colleagues in local authorities.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: Southern Cross offers clue to designating essential services
Those nasty bits in the health reforms where snazzy well-loved hospital buildings were going to get “designated” as essential while boring outpatient and orthopaedic departments were cast aside as ultimately dispensable have gone, right?
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CommentSally Gainsbury: sitting duck surpluses
When the going gets tough, the tough hide their surpluses from the grasping claws of the strategic health authority.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: wistful thinking on PFI
Ask an NHS finance director what they hope will come out of the McKinsey review of 22 trusts with tricky private finance initiatives and they talk wistfully about a revised market forces factor – the calculation that determines any top-up paid for delivering services in a particular area.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: flogging off the freehold
While Aunt Sally and her straw man continue to bicker about just how much extra competition Mr Lansley is or isn’t introducing into the NHS, a genuine real life policy question demands answering.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: a cunning plot, outed
The conspiracy theorists were busy earlier this month proposing that Monitor had deliberately “buried” its updated financial assumptions over the bank holiday weekend.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: balancing the books with creative 'fiddling'
It is year-end accounts closing time and finance departments are a hive of fevered book balancing. This column wants to salute the best of that and so is launching the NHS Finance Departments Delivering Liberty and Excellence – FiDDLE – award.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: scary care cuts
I’ve had reason to delve around local government “savings” plans recently, and compared with QIPP they make for scary reading.
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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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NewsGPs commission controversial complementary therapies
Having been given the purse strings to the NHS commissioning budget, a host of GPs opted to commission complementary therapies, including acupuncture and aromatherapy.