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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“crisis, what crisis?”
Recent media stories about an NHS crisis function to divert attention away from the ideologically driven dismantling of a national institution
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Is skewing the data any different to juking the stats?
Media representations about NHS scandals focus on ‘bad apple’ professionals, and ignore the crises caused by current government policy, and the commercialisation of UK statutory healthcare.
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For integration, read fragmentation
Integrated care as a panacea for all that ails the NHS masks wider processes of privatisation in the English healthcare system. Debate about the shape and tenor of integrated care is needed to reverse the ongoing marketisation of statutory English...
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From “doctor knows best” to “market knows best”
We are consistently told by this government that the public sector is wasteful and inefficient and that the private sector offers much better value for money for the ‘Great British Taxpayer’. The evidence for this is scant to say the...
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Bloody markets
Recent media discussions about the privatisation of UK blood supply draw from concerns about marketisation much more explicitly than debates about any other facet of healthcare. Why is this, and what does it say about the role of markets in...
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Questions of trust…?
Another week, another scandal involving the Care Quality Commission (CQC). This time the sorry catalogue of events relates to a maternity unit in Morecambe Bay. As details of the report were leaked prior to publication this week, the tone and...
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Universal Credit and Welfare reform and the vilification of the ‘undeserving poor’
The universal credit (UC) proposals involve amalgamating six pre-existing means-tested benefit payments and tax credits into one monthly payment. This new payment is purported to simplify an overly complex, bureaucratic system of social welfare. Simplification of the complex UK system...
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Playing the blame game: political capital and Mid Staffs
The much-anticipated Francis Report on the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry was published last week. At the centre of the inquiry was the elevated level of Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs). Essentially this means that death-rates in this...
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Inequality as a test of strength…?
Notions of recovery and resilience are ubiquitous at the moment. Resilience particularly seems to have made the jump from a concept in positive psychology material into a mainstream policy objective ranging across inequality, poverty, and community wellbeing (to name but...
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Evidence versus autonomy in TB treatment: a tale of two professions
Today we are used to the idea that medical therapies and interventions are based on some form of evidence about patient outcomes. Indeed the new commissioning processes enshrined in the Health and Social Care Act require NHS commissioners to place...
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Q: “When is an NHS provider not a qualified provider?” A: “When it’s a willing provider…”