Making space for activity
All doom and gloom about the NHS this week – and I thought we needed some light relief so started with play. In our road we have a street play scheme. As in other places this followed a popular annual...
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The Remploy Saga: the provider state isn’t providing and the enabling state doesn’t enable.
I saw Government Minister Mark Harper interviewed on my local television news the other day (BBC Look East, Jan. 12th 2015). He was talking about how, in his opinion, the closure of the last publicly owned Remploy factories was, somewhat...
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2015: Time for politicians to make a healthy New Year’s resolution
It’s that time of year. Millions of British people resolve to change. Quit smoking. Eat better. Exercise more. Drink less. Breaking a New Year’s resolution is as much a British tradition as making one though. So what can we learn...
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Highlights of 2014
Dear Readers, Thanks for reading our posts and for following us on twitter. Also thanks to the many guest authors who have blogged for us over the last year. We hope you all have a merry break and a very...
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Children in Need of Charity?
Each year the country comes together in mass acts of philanthropy, raising money in all kinds of inventive, extraordinary and impressive ways to help children who are less fortunate than they are. Each year a significant amount of money is...
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Trouble in social democratic paradise – the Swedish model crumbles?
I live in the social democratic paradise that a generation of British-lefties admired as the good society: Sweden. Radical social reforms undertaken from 1932 to 1976 (when the Social Democratic party governed continuously), engineered a system that lived up to...
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Visibility and invisibility in a leaderless NHS
Alex Stevenson wrote a piece on the politics.co.uk blog last week where he talked about leadership in the post-reform NHS. He reviewed the findings of a recent Public Administration Select Committee, detailing a lack of accountability across UK healthcare provision,...
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Detoxing Schools: Do lotteries for school places offer the best medicine?
The best social science book I have read this year is Toxic Schools, Bowen Paulle’s account of urban high-school-life in New York and Amsterdam. Paulle demonstrates how divisive educational systems that segregate poor, black and other ethnic minority students into...
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Ebola: Media Narratives and Public Responses
The Ebola crisis has been described by the WHO as “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times” and national governments, aid organisations and others have reacted to the crisis at this level. But what about public understandings...
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Evidence, Experience & Exclusions: A review of a recent workshop
‘Can experience be used as evidence?’ That was the question at a workshop organized earlier this month by the Health Experiences Group at Oxford. The question does not only interest academics. Researchers from different disciplines were joined by clinicians, policy...
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Last throw of the dice…?
Is the granting of new rights to desperate patients and their doctors in the Medical Innovations Bill a valiant attempt to save lives – or will it turn the NHS into an unethical guinea-pig farm?
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“Sweating like a pig, feeling like a fox”: women’s sporting bodies on Screen