All Comment articles – Page 232
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CommentBritnell: the NHS performs amongst the best but it can be better
Just over two years ago, as some people knew, the NHS saved my life. My family and I shall always be grateful to it and will always support it.
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CommentMedia 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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CommentMichael 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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CommentClamour for local involvement rising in North West
The question of how much influence local people should have on changes to NHS services is concentrating minds in the North West.
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CommentSally Gainsbury: a cunning plot, outed
The conspiracy theorists were busy earlier this month proposing that Monitor had deliberately “buried” its updated financial assumptions over the bank holiday weekend.
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CommentEast of England PCT scrapes together year-end surplus
NHS South West Essex predicted in the autumn it was heading for a £43m overspend on its budget, but it limped over the year-end line with a small surplus. How did it manage it?
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CommentThe listening exercise needs to reach grass roots voices
The government appears to be listening hard in a bid to appease opposition to the health service reforms - but, as Asthma UK chief executive Neil Churchill explains, some patient groups’ concerns are still not being addressed.
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CommentMark 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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Comment
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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CommentNoel 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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CommentSeeking 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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CommentNorth 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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CommentMichael 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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CommentPassing 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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CommentScaling 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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CommentFit 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
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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CommentCross 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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CommentMaking 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'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.