A few weeks ago now the BMA launched a campaign to end market-based reform in the NHS. Their vision: the NHS ‘restored as a public service working co-operatively for patients’, that is publicly funded through central taxes, publicly provided and publicly accountable. Ok. Very good. It’s a nice idea, but we should also remember why… [Read More]
Once upon a time, Turkey decided it would like to join an attractive little club known as the EEC, writes Nicola Di Luzio. First it was rejected outright. Then, the club realised it could use membership as a carrot to encourage reform and friendly relations, so it waved membership under the country’s nose… for fifty… [Read More]
This week sees another set of venerable institutions, long enfeebled by years of over-indulgence at the public trough, singled out by Parliament, if not exactly for euthanasia, then for slow asphyxiation by ever tighter state-regulation.
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.