Comment archive – Page 418
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Comment
Simon Stevens on the top-up payment maze
The government has committed to answering at some time in the coming weeks a highly awkward dilemma: whether or not to allow NHS patients to make 'top-up' payments to cover treatments the NHS will not fund.
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Comment
Media Watch: public health drive
Andrew Lansley argued last week that businesses would sign up to the public health drive as long as they weren't subject to excessive regulation.
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Comment
Michael White on public health policy
Andrew Lansley seems to have been the first health politico to get off the beach and back in hot water this summer with that 'no excuses, no nannying' speech he made to the pro-market Reform think tank.
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Comment
Data protection in the NHS - a ticking time bomb?
The health service's procedures for protecting confidential data are worryingly inadequate, argue Sven Putnis and Andrew Bircher
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Comment
Gay Lee on the social care debate
Nurses and social workers know it is impossible to tell where social care ends and healthcare begins. Yet they waste time, effort and money trying to prise them apart - because government policy says they must.
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Comment
Amanda Doyle on the trouble with patient choice
Lord Darzi, in his next stage review, talks a lot about choice, and why not? Greater choice of healthcare provider is, undoubtedly, a good thing.
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Comment
John Cochran on healers, leaders and partners
Lord Darzi's review singles out Kaiser Permanente in the US as an example of an organisation with strong clinical leadership and says the NHS can learn from its 'practitioner, partner, leader' model. Permanente Federation director John Cochran explains
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Comment
Paul Jennings on the commissioner-provider split
It is just over two years since we began separating the commissioning and provider arms in Walsall teaching primary care trust.
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Comment
Jenny Rogers on forced fun
I have a memory: my one-year-old child is squatting in the kitchen looking a touch restless. Feeling it my maternal duty to play, I approach with a synthetic 'let's-have-fun' voice.
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Comment
Andrew Jones on achieving quality care
Piloting the NHS towards quality requires robust regulation and inspection, and the DH has already set up overlapping organisations to provide this, presumably with a thinly spread budget. But if Lord Darzi's plan is to be accomplished, it will require action rather than rhetoric, and action requires funding.
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Comment
Naomi Chambers on grumpy boards
With Lord Darzi's review of the NHS casting an uncertain light on the role of boards, some members might be forgiven for becoming tetchy, mistrustful, grumbling souls who always seem to be on the defensive
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Leader
Divide and rule: time for the UK to debate its four health systems
Among the oceans of data washing around the NHS, it is striking that government has avoided collecting one of the most illuminating sets of figures - comparisons between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
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Leader
Clinical code-breaking jeopardises safety
The Audit Commission's exposure of a high error rate in clinical coding has an impact far beyond payment by results.
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Comment
Your Humble Servant on co-payments and co-operation
To: Don Wise, chief executiveFrom: Paul Servant, assistant chief executiveRE: No-payment?
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Comment
Media Watch: teenage time bomb
The NHS is facing a 'teenage time bomb', several newspapers warned this week, based on statistics showing increased admissions of young people to hospital.
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Comment
Noel Plumridge on a family tragedy
When the mobile phone leaps into life before 8am, it's usually ominous. Yesterday was no exception, with a text from my sister Amy: 'Tony has been in a terrible accident and is fighting 4 his life. Everyone pls pray 4 him.'
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Comment
Michael White on the golden age of the NHS
I have been sitting in patchy sunshine reading Rejuvenate or Retire? the Nuffield Trust's anthology to mark the NHS 60th anniversary.
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Comment
Ginette Camps-Walsh on measuring patient satisfaction
Lord Darzi's next stage review sets out that the NHS will begin systematically measuring and publishing information about the quality of the care it provides. Measures will include patients' views on the success of their treatment and the quality of their experiences.
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Comment
David Levy on the changing face of clinical leadership
Clinical leadership is changing in response to Lord Darzi's review of the NHS, but the changes have not been uniform across the health community.
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Comment
Lisa Rodrigues on foundation trust tips
Well, we did it. Sussex Partnership foundation trust - a teaching trust of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School - was born on 1 August 2008.