Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
“Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1945) With the half-life of NHS policies now measured in days and weeks, it was with weary resignation, rather than...
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Data & the gaming of A&E waiting times
A few days ago I found myself investigating the bed occupancy statistics for an NHS hospital trust. This was in response to a friend telling me that the hospital had found the need to invent a new colour level of...
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Public troubles and private lives – how could ‘iHomecare’ be the answer to the social care crisis?
There is a permanent contradiction in the sphere of health and social care in that one person’s home is another person’s workplace, such that people’s private lives are intertwined with public responses to those lives (i.e. the state provision of...
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Making a virtue of variation? The fragmentation of the English NHS
Geographic reform of the NHS is not new: region, district, area, and locality are all familiar terms in NHS history, and notions of “place” as an organising principle retain an intrinsic appeal for policy-makers. Recently, the English NHS has now...
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Why the NHS needs an immigration policy with strict hypocrisy controls
How did the UK come to find itself facing a major political crisis with the prospect of expending the forseeable future redefining its relationship with the European Union? One of the key contributing factors is that political leaders allowed the issue...
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On Brexit, Nurses and Migrant Workers in the NHS
Figures released this week by the Nursing and Midwifery Council show a 96% drop in the number of EU nurses applying for jobs in the UK after the Brexit vote in June 2016. In July 2016, 1304 nurses joined the...
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Extending Patient Access to GPs: who will benefit?
Investing in extended patient access to GPs is a key government objective, but which patients will benefit, and will it have its intended consequences? Despite little evidence that it is demanded by patients, extended access to GPs, providing care outside...
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Progressive alliances & the parlous state of British democracy
There was news this week that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt faces an ‘unauthorised’ progressive alliance in his Surrey constituency that will attempt (against Labour Party policy) to unseat him in the forthcoming general election. The proposal is that local Labour...
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The real crisis in the NHS is democratic
The decision by the British Red Cross to suggest that the NHS was experiencing a ‘humanitarian crisis’ predictably instigated a public debate as to exactly what the terms of reference were for an event to be considered a humanitarian crisis...
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Mind the Gap: On John Berger, mystification and the NHS
A couple of events this past week have put me in mind of some of the insights from John Berger’s classic text ‘Ways of Seeing’. In an age of ‘post-truth politics’, the observations and comments in this 45-year-old book seem...
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Introducing the new Easyjet NHS
As a rather plump NHS campaigner bedevilled by man boobs, I was given two good reasons to baulk at the recent announcement by The Vale of York CCG that they intended to restrict obese patients’ access to elective surgery until...
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Resuscitating CAMHS: Something has to be done