All Your Humble Servant articles – Page 3
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: lights, camera, casualty
‘The crying was spot on. As you talked with humility about the demise of Mrs Smith, the tears that began rolling down your cheeks captured the emotion and sincerity of our apology perfectly’
-
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: weapons of self-destruction
If GPs would not stop referring patients to hospital, we had to get rid of both.
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: manifest nonsense
‘Imagine - under the Tories, we are going to have new NHS organisations called foundation trusts, a tariff payment process, a choose and book system, a quality and outcomes framework for paying GPs and a formula that channels NHS funds to poorer areas’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: regulation...
‘What’s important is that if you’re crap you own up and if you’re fabulous you live to fail another day’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: election gamble
‘There is no easy or predictable way of knowing how to please Labour and live to tell the tale’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: Andy Burnsley
‘Andrew Lansley on the other hand has a real problem. It’s the same one that Chris Smith and Frank Dobson had back in 1997. Like them, Andrew doesn’t have a health policy, because he is using his opponent’s one.’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: McKinsey, McJected
‘Imagine if you are in your umpteenth meeting in a hospital or PCT or SHA somewhere, with a McKinseyite costing your directorate’s annual savings plan being taught the McKinsey way of saving the world. You are going to be feeling a little dubious about it all’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant: NHS carbon reduction
‘The NHS could immediately achieve much larger savings if the SHAs, Monitor and CQC stopped emitting the whole time… after all there is carbon in flatulence isn’t there?’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant on the future of NHS technology
‘Just imagine, you’ll log in to check out the rash in your groin, and “Amazon recommends” will also tell you how other people rated their experience with rashes’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant attends an NHS disciplinary appeal hearing
‘Between them they will have conspired to identify an incompetent who needs to be dispatched, and then utterly fail to put together a case, identify relevant evidence, or present it in a way that can land a caress, let alone a punch, on the miscreant’s credibility’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant on private lessons
We are all still reeling from the shock news of Mark Britnell’s sudden departure for pastures more remunerative. Thankfully he has left us with a commissioning sector which no one else in the world can match… and oddly none has sought to do so.
-
CommentYour Humble Servant on the NHS reshuffle
To: Don Wise, chief executiveFrom: Paul Servant, assistant chief executiveRe: NHS reshuffle
-
CommentYour Humble Servant on some final foundation trust hurdles
The quest for FT status is all looking so promising, apart from all the things that could go wrong…
-
CommentYour Humble Servant on appropriate attire
It can be hard to decide how to dress for a dress-down, informal bonding session with colleagues, as ours gamely proved.
-
CommentYour Humble Servant rides with the new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
‘System alignment is everyone agreeing with the DH that these are four bloody good principles’
-
CommentHumble Servant bids the Healthcare Commission adieu
‘We will all miss the traffic lights and star ratings, its mission to condemn and flagellate, and the valuable role it has fulfilled for the Department of Health in shutting stable doors after horses have bolted’
-
CommentYour Humble Servant on management training
‘We concluded that we would need Stalin’s ruthlessness, Patton’s brilliance, Machiavelli’s cunning and Robert Maxwell’s sophistry’
-
Comment
Your Humble Servant on the hospitality challenge
‘As you know we have tried to look into the benefits of applying for AHSC status ourselves, but have been told that it’s all about being internationally competitive so even with our cohort of Filippino nurses we wouldn’t qualify’
-
Comment
Your Humble Servant on councillor counselling
‘We are faced with a glorious mix of councillors, some so young they’d obviously been selected for seats they hadn’t been expected to win and have had to be parked out of trouble until they are out of nappies’












