External contributors – Page 256
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Kevin Fickenscher on collaborative IT leadership
When the NHS was created 60 years ago, no-one could have imagined the groundbreaking work the service does today, or even the role technology plays in enabling clinicians to deliver care.
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Mark Goldman on raising the NHS bar
It's official. The NHS provides the most equitable healthcare anywhere in the world. But there are 18 countries whose citizens have better outcomes following cancer treatment than we do.
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Helen Bevan on NHS finance directors
As an NHS improvement leader I work with many staff groups. One group that was barely on my radar a year ago, but with which I now work with regularly, is NHS finance leaders.
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Julia Tybura on visualising world class commissioning
Watching the Olympic women's weightlifting - yes, I should get out more - I was struck by the sheer focus of a Chinese woman who won gold.
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Angela Greatley on tackling social exclusion
There is a group of people who are chronically excluded from housing, work, relationships and the kinds of activity most people aspire to in 21st century Britain. They exhibit the most complex problems but they can be the most excluded from the very help they need.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.