Health secretary Andy Burnham wants powers to formally to ask Monitor, the independent regulatory organisation for foundation trusts (FTs), to intervene with FT management where there is “demonstrable poor quality, demonstrable poor governance or a failure of leadership.” The proposal is set out in a current DH consultation.
According to new government figures there is a “huge gender gap” in young children’s abilities. One in four boys, the stats tell us, struggles to write their own name by the age of five, and one in five can’t count to 10. Carry on reading at Guardian CiF.
by Peter Davies There’s a glorious pattern to ministerial responses. Here’s the Department of Health’s official spokesman quoted in The Daily Telegraph, in repost to our book ‘Putting Patients Last’, released today, in which we argue that the new generation of NHS organisations, set up ‘businesses’, still have much to learn about customer service. Under… [Read More]
By Nicola Di Luzio EU Tube and ‘Captain Euro’ may sound like satire, but unfortunately they take themselves very seriously. Having spent the past half hour gazing at my computer screen in a half-way house between horror and incredulous hilarity, I have no doubt that you too might benefit from the procrastination opportunities that Captain… [Read More]
‘If it gives a couple like us the chance to start a family, then surely it is good thing.’ So was an infertile woman quoted as arguing in yesterday’s Times for infertile couples like her and her husband to be allowed to buy eggs from fertile women. At present, donor payment is illegal here and,… [Read More]
Ever since Lord Darzi’s publication last year, High Quality Care for All, all the rhetoric is in the higher echelons of the NHS is that quality is the new organising principle (as if it shouldn’t always have been). It’s the new ‘buzzword’, replacing ‘tariff’, ‘payment-by-results’, ‘foundation status’ etc., according to the former minister. Certainly –… [Read More]
The Children, Schools and Families Select Committee released its findings yesterday on the role of ministers in the 2008 Sats fiasco, which saw hundreds of thousands of Key Stage 3 pupils waiting months for their test results.
Twenty pounds to see your GP? The headlines are ablaze with the recommendation made this week by the Social Market Foundation in the report ‘From Feast to Famine: Reforming the NHS for an age of austerity’. The charge is suggested as a mechanism to constrain growth in demand for health care.
‘The person for Henry Kissinger to call if he wants to speak to Europe’ is just one of the ways that the potential post of President of the European Council is being described, writes Nicola Di Luzio (with the emphasis on ‘potential’ – since the new post is a part of the Lisbon Treaty, which… [Read More]
The Charities Act of 2006 demanded not unreasonably that, to qualify for the tax breaks that accompany charitable status, bodies seeking it must prove themselves of public benefit. Less reasonably, Parliament left the task of stipulating what constitutes public benefit to the Charities Commission.