All articles by End Game – Page 4
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Blogs
Seagull strife
To North Bristol Trust, where the move into the new £430m private finance initiative hospital has for the most part gone smoothly.However, the state of the art new building has fallen victim to one act of nature which End Game imagines did not appear on any risk register prior to ...
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Blogs
Expenses.data
Following the Daily Telegraph’s revelations this week about the “lavish” expenses being claimed by NHS England’s top table, End Game was left wondering whether its chief Simon Stevens could have been handed a better opportunity to do what all new bosses do best: to draw a line in the ...
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Blogs
The 6cs
If you’re struggling to remember the six Cs of compassionate care then fear no more – there is now an allegedly catchy song to assist.Accompanied by plink plonk piano and stirring guitar strings, student nurse and Caremaker general Samuel McPhail has woven the six Cs (care, compassion, commitment, courage, communication ...
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Blogs
Slim pickings
Spare a kind thought for the Trust Development Authority. Oh, go on. When news of its 70 per cent budget boost broke, it must have been greeted with glee, among its officers at least. Hotel upgrades and fine dining all round! All in the name of essential networking, of course.Now ...
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Blogs
Non-PC robots versus man
Ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, the humble human was suffered at the hand of technology as much as she has benefitted from it.The most recent example of this ancient truth was unearthed in Northampton.Local paper Northampton Chronicle wins an EndGame applause for a story on how cuts ...
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Blogs
Campaign emergency
End Game hates election time and its dreaded “purdah”, the 40 days and 40 nights of abstinence, where press officers claim they are banned from answering our carefully crafted queries on the spurious grounds that openness and honesty could somehow interfere with the European and local elections.So imagine our surprise ...
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Blogs
Booking in the consultants
A novel combining the flowing prose of a master wordsmith and a poignant critique of the social issues of the day is something of a holy grail for End Game.So when Alex Knight’s Pride and Joy – which appears to tackle the issues faced by the NHS via a riveting ...
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Blogs
Moral question
We at End Game regularly have our morals called into question, but rarely are we brazenly flirted with by interviewees.No longer: a nursing director – who on balance we have decided not to identify – signed off a an otherwise run-of-the-mill chat with the mother of all non-sequiturs, by asking ...
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Blogs
Dispatches from the other side
“I’m available”. With those two lonely, listless words, Sir David Nicholson summed up the tragedy of retirement.It will be no surprise to readers that End Game saw the utterance on Twitter, where Sir David continues to display the symptoms of a keen mind in search of something, anything, to do. ...
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Blogs
Get a grip
The elderly. When we were babies they cradled us, secure in the knowledge that when their hour of need arrived we would return the favour.Why don’t they just “Get a Grip”? Not our words – this is the name of an initiative from South Cheshire and Vale Royal CCGs who ...
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Blogs
iPath
Ipods revolutionised, and possibly destroyed, the recording industry forever, with their convenience, user friendliness and the bewildering, strangely alienating level of choice they offer.Vinyl records, on the other hand, may be fragile and cumbersome, but are also beautiful and comforting objects that ooze history and value.So what are we to ...
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BlogsDepartment of dogs
End Game hears many reports of hairy beasts roaming the corridors of Richmond House but rarely are they serving any purpose which could be deemed therapeutic for anyone apart from perhaps themselves.So it was heartwarming to hear that the department’s policy teams were visited by three flat coated retriever dogs ...
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BlogsLooky likey
Buzz LightyearWhen HSJ naughtily put together a joke piece for April Fool’s Day, we thought we had made it implausible enough to be self-evidently a joke.Chortling to ourselves, we ran a story stating that ministers would have to tell the truth in future, as they were to be subjected to ...
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BlogsLooky unlikely
Jon Restell: the charming chief executive of the union for HSJ readers, Managers In Partnership.Gordon Brown: author of unpopular books and noted Arctic Monkeys fan.No-one actually thinks these two gentlemen look anything alike, except for a jocular passer-by (isn’t that always the worst sort of passer-by?) who spotted Mr Restell ...
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Blogs
Anyone who had a heart
Jeremy Hunt continues to have a lovely time criss-crossing the nation visiting hospitals and seeing all the wonderful things that are going on.The latest trust to have the honour was Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. Tweeteth Jeremy: “Thanks to staff @SheffieldHosp for a great afternoon seeing surgical teams at the cutting edge. ...
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Blogs
Big hairy audacious cliche
End Game was chuffed to see Ara Darzi was returning to health policy world as chair of the London Health Commission, and sincerely hopes that his high quality thoughts actually get listened to this time.Thumbing through the commission’s recently published evidence summary, we also noted another blast from the recent ...
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Blogs
Daughters of fortune
The world of finance is more commonly associated with mammon and the love of money, aka the root of all evil, than with holiness and the simple life of devotion to the Lord.So imagine our surprise when we learned that a group of nuns called the Congregation of the Daughters ...
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Blogs
A salty bullet
Forget about pay restraint, referral management and primary care prescribing, there’s a new show in QIPP town apparently – bath salts.Reports have reached End Game, via fashion and beauty bible Cosmopolitan, that these “age old health boosters” could also save the NHS £14.5 billion annually.Yes, just under a seventh of ...
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Blogs
The Nicholson Index
In one of his last speeches as NHS England boss, Sir David Nicholson gave his final assessment of the reformed commissioning sector, a year post-transition.Clinical commissioning groups were given a strong eight marks out of 10, and credited them for the fact that the system had not rapidly collapsed in ...
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Blogs
Beneath blue suburban skies
If John Winston Lennon and Paul James McCartney had written Penny Lane today instead of back in the sixties they may have replaced their fond reference to the barbers shop with a hospital.And not just any hospital. Private healthcare firm Spire has announced the building at Number One Penny Lane ...