All articles by Simon Stevens
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CommentStevens: government has shown ‘wilful blindness’ in its approach to workforce planning
Former NHS England chief executive Lord Stevens addressed the NHS’s workforce challenges during the House of Lords debate on the Health and Care Bill earlier this week. This is a, lightly, edited version of what he said.
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CommentHSJ annual lecture transcript: Simon Stevens' on forward view for the NHS
The edited transcript of the speech given by Simon Stevens at the HSJ inaugural lecture.
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Simon Stevens: living to be 500, death by asteroid, and the inevitability of NHS reform
Health reformers should paint an inspiring vision of what progress could mean for patients and for health professionals rather than focus on the negatives that have necessitated it, says Simon Stevens.
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CommentSimon Stevens on incentives for doctors vs incentives for patients
Stop the presses for some shock news. British GPs are happy. At least relatively speaking.
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CommentSimon Stevens on the best healthcare system in the world
Torture the statistics until they confess. That seems to be the approach of many academics, journalists and policy wonks to the ideologically loaded question: which country’s healthcare system is best?
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CommentSimon Stevens on Labour’s mistakes
Heat rather than light has been the main output of this summer’s transatlantic healthcare comparisons.
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CommentSimon Stevens on an NHS budget showdown
Who gets what? Surely that is the essence of politics, and never more so than when times are tight. When a rising tide carries all boats, economic growth tends to obscure the question.
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CommentSimon Stevens: on lifestyles and living beyond 100
If all goes well, next month my wife’s grandma will turn 100. That is a birthday only around one in 5,000 of her peers will be around to celebrate. Not bad for a woman who, like millions of others, emigrated between the two world wars from eastern Europe to New ...
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CommentSimon Stevens on toothless dental policies
Dentistry. The very word is enough to sink hearts on the fourth floor of Richmond House. The dental status quo is always said to be terrible. And every change allegedly makes it worse. That is what happened after the 1990 dental contract, and again after the 2006 contract.
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CommentSimon Stevens on what the Budget means for health spending
So the Budget has confirmed what we already knew: there’s a major public spending crunch ahead. Spending across government is targeted to grow at just 0.7 per cent over the period 2011-12 to 2013-14.
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CommentSimon Stevens on influencing clinical decision making
Paradoxically one of the most important determinants of healthcare quality and efficiency is one that NHS managers can do very little to influence, in fact it is practically invisible to the managerial gaze: the quality of clinical decision making.
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Simon Stevens on NHS lessons from the circus
At a recent dinner I found myself sitting next to the worldwide chief operating officer of Cirque du Soleil.
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Simon Stevens on an NHS game plan for 2009
Happy New Year. Or is it? With so much talk of recession and economic gloom, it's easy to forget the NHS's benign position, compared with - say - the car industry, retail, or financial services.
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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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Simon Stevens on health policy trends
Rather than attend this year's party conferences, I decided instead to take the temperature on US health reform at the two presidential nominating conventions.
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Simon Stevens on the top-up payment maze
The government has committed to answering at some time in the coming weeks a highly awkward dilemma: whether or not to allow NHS patients to make 'top-up' payments to cover treatments the NHS will not fund.
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Simon Stevens on a good year for Darzi
As wine experts will occasionally admit, it's hard to know how a new vintage will perform. Wines age, maturation takes time. And a decent bottle may be overshadowed by a later blockbuster year.
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Simon Stevens on on China's plans for healthcare
In Beijing a few weeks ago, discussing alternative health reform models with Chinese government officials, I was struck by the fact that at about the time the NHS Plan was being formulated in 2000, China was embarking on a similar 10-year health plan.
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Simon Stevens on value for money in the NHS
What is the biggest black box in the NHS? By which I mean, where is the worst ratio of cash to clarity about what taxpayers are getting for their money?
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News
Simon Stevens on improving payment by results
In my last column, I discussed evidence on how payment by results is actually working.