External contributors – Page 262
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Comment
Stephen Ramsden on patient safety's missing link
I remain vexed by the question ‘how can we engage junior doctors in patient safety?’
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Comment
Alastair Henderson on the NHS staff survey
The largest of its kind, the NHS staff survey last year captured the feelings of 156,000 employees from all 391 trusts in England.
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Steve Barnett on world class NHS leaders
It is not hard to think of bad leaders. A recent poll named figures from Stalin to Vlad the Impaler who score badly in the popularity stakes, while Steve McClaren, 'the wally with the brolly', springs to my mind.
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Comment
Mark Britnell on world class commissioning so far
Morituri te salutamus, as the gladiators said in Roman amphitheatres: We who are about to die salute you.
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Comment
Sandy Watson on how the NHS can help young people
At any one time, there are about 35,000 young people in Scotland who are not in education, employment or training. Of these, 6,000 are aged 16, 9,000 aged 17, 12,000 aged 18, and 8,000 aged 19. Men are more likely to fall into this group than women.
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CommentAngela Greatley on the Mental Health Act
From 3 November, most parts of the long-awaited and often feared 2007 Mental Health Act will be implemented. For the NHS, the new act presents major challenges by extending the scope of compulsory powers and by creating some new safeguards for those subject to them.
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Comment
Michael Marmot on eliminating social injustice in health
Glasgow had a little more publicity than it might have welcomed when the report of the World Health Organisation's commission on social determinants of health, which I chaired, was published in August.
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Comment
Your Humble Servant on foundation trusts
To: Don Wise, chief executiveFrom: Paul Servant, assistant chief executiveRe: Money, Money, Monitor
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Comment
Media Watch: healthcare reviews
Unlike certain colleagues, health secretary Alan Johnson has never been invited onto a billionaire's gin palace. 'Trawlers occasionally, but never yachts,' he told The Daily Telegraph.
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Comment
Michael White on pharmaceutical price regulation
I am indebted to Fred Curzon, 7th Earl Howe and veteran Tory health spokesman in the Lords, for a little gem of a debate in the upper house the other evening. It was doubtless neglected because of the Yachtgate affair in Corfu and relative trivia like the global financial collapse.
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Comment
Kevin Fickenscher on robotics and patient care
Robotics in healthcare is revolutionising the way medical personnel work together and how patients are treated.
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Comment
Richard Knowles on NHS command and control
Command and control is a term that is increasingly used in the current target-driven healthcare climate.
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Comment
Mark Goldman on a happy ending for NHS top-ups
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will begin. Once upon a time there was an elusive apostrophe. He lived in the NHS and was always causing mischief with his friend 'patients'. Together they would hide from the managers and clinicians.
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Comment
Ruth Thorlby on the price of healthcare in the US
For a new arrival to the US, embarking on the Health Foundation's Harkness Fellowship in New York, it is hard to take in the full litany of facts about the 46 million Americans with no health insurance.
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Comment
Neil Goodwin on charismatic leadership
Leadership was ever present during a recent vacation in New England. There was, of course, the national presidential election and the administration's financial bailout debacle, which The New York Times summarised as an absence of national leadership.
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Comment
Ron Newall on patient and public involvement
There has never been a better time for patients and the public to become involved in decision-making for healthcare services - although some cynics might disagree.
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Comment
Media Watch: patient referrals
A US pilot sent to shoot down a UFO on a dark night in East Anglia some 50 years ago only to find nothing but, well, dark night, recalled in Monday's Guardian that it 'was like being a one-legged man sent into an ass-kicking contest'.
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Comment
Nigel Edwards on NHS exceptional case panels
Over the summer no media report on the state of the NHS was complete without mention of the postcode lottery in treatments, either through challenges to primary care trust exceptional case panels or the perceived ethics of the current rules on top-ups.
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Comment
Michael White on keeping patients out of hospital
It is not often you read of a new controversy in the Sunday papers and stumble on what looks like the answer in Hansard before bedtime. It happened this week. Here goes.
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Comment
Henry Carleton on the European working time directive
The chair of the British Medical Association consultants' committee recently suggested that the problems posed by the European working time directive could be solved by employing more consultants and ensuring managers work closely with clinical colleagues.