All Comment articles – Page 216
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Comment
Michael White: mixed-market debate feels like déjà vu all over again
“John Redwood is right” is not a sentence I try to utter very often. The Tory right winger is brainy and high minded, but he places too much faith in markets and lacks political sense.
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Media Watch: Clegg back in the spotlight after veto pledge
Unsurprisingly one health story dominated the papers at the start of the week.
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Mark Britnell: the NHS funding model is no longer 'resilient'
A sophisticated discussion on how – and how much – the health service should be funded is badly needed to avoid undoing two decades worth of progress.
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Ben Gowland: changing the minds of managers in a clinically led NHS
In all the talk of radical health service reforms, one of the factors which has almost been forgotten is the revolutionary shift in mindset required of the NHS manager in primary care.
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Passing judgement on Lansley's vision
A year after the general election, Andrew Lansley and his controversial reforms are under fire. HSJ asks four leading figures - Stephen Dorrell, David Kerr, Alan Milburn and Bill Moyes - to hand down their verdict on Lansley’s vision.
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Michael White: despite distractions, the focus remains trained on reforms
Did you catch that row over the NHS at prime minister’s question time? No, I thought not. What with the royal nuptial and the killing of Osama bin Laden we have all had a lot on our media plate.
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Comment
North East on course to meet targets, but some regions are still feeling the heat
With the financial year ended, overall performance during 2010-11 is becoming a bit clearer. Both NHS North East and Yorkshire and the Humber appear to have met headline targets, but Yorkshire is showing signs of strain.
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Seeking sustainability on the South Coast
News that Portsmouth Hospitals Trust is one of 22 predicted to struggle to gain foundation trust status because of a hefty private finance deal would have come as little surprise to the local health economy.
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Noel Plumridge: calling any qualified commissioners
Last week’s public accounts committee report on the NHS landscape states: “Most important, the department has not yet got a framework to deal with failure in the system, be it on the provider side or the commissioning side”.
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Comment
Scaling up collaboration: the public health manifesto
I recently had the privilege of attending a lecture by Sir Michael Marmot, the guru of health inequalities and public health.
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Comment
Fit for purpose: keeping vital employment support for patients with long-term conditions
Work is of enormous benefit to many people with long-term conditions. But, writes Daloni Carlisle, it may soon be a lot harder for people to receive NHS support to stay in employment.
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Comment
Making room for meddling in the East
While strategic health authorities wind down to their abolition – now slightly delayed – clustering has begun to meddle with the map.
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Comment
Cross border mental health contracts emerge in the South East
The mental health providers of the South East coast region are currently keen to engage in some cross border commercial activity.
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Comment
The barriers to achieving cost effective interventions
A lack of clarity around the effectiveness of out of hospital interventions is preventing their potential cost efficiencies from being realised. But, says Nuffield Trust director Jennifer Dixon, there are reasons to be cheerful.
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Comment
'Without evidence, the rhetorical reforms are irrelevant at best'
As real funding is eroded amid grand health policy rhetoric, there is a desperate need for hard evidence and data to inform the fundamental policy challenges facing this government. Without it, the reforms are all but irrelevant, argues York University professor of health economics Alan Maynard.
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Comment
Sally Gainsbury: balancing the books with creative 'fiddling'
It is year-end accounts closing time and finance departments are a hive of fevered book balancing. This column wants to salute the best of that and so is launching the NHS Finance Departments Delivering Liberty and Excellence – FiDDLE – award.
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Comment
Michael White: the Tory rhetoric is now bogged down in detail
Over a junk food lunch with NHS heavies recently I found the conversation turning – yet again – to Andrew Lansley. Is he on the level? Does he have a hidden agenda to privatise the system? That kind of thing.
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Keeping safer service delivery at the forefront of the NHS
The NHS has made great strides in delivering safer services: the recent work on surgical check lists is another excellent example that hospitals cannot afford to ignore. However there is still much to do, says Paul Zollinger-Read.
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Comment
Why the reforms need to avoid penalising NHS and local government relationships
Areas where improved health outcomes are already being delivered through strong NHS and local government partnerships will be hoping the negative impact the reforms could have on this success will be seriously reviewed, writes Blackburn with Darwen chief executive Graham Burgess.
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Cally Bann: the Big Society's 'Big Listen'
I have my doubts whether this period of political deflection, that is, reflection, will bring changes of any substance to the NHS reforms.