External contributors – Page 308
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'Turnaround teams' - a sticking plaster for a severed limb?
The ability to commission effective and efficient services is completely divorced from strategies to implement and provide cost-effective services, argue Angela Bate and Cam Donaldson
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Skilled analysts of little use to the NHS
Do external consultants working in NHS organisations really deliver the goods? Birmingham University's Jonathan Shapiro argues that they may know how to diagnose problems, but cultural signposts pass them by
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Cliff Prior profile: 'The only thing you can't predict is where it will go'
In his new job heading a group of not-for-profit organisations, former Rethink chief executive Cliff Prior will have a key role in reshaping community services. But first he has to explain what it is all about
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Malcolm Lowe-Lauri on the right targets
Once upon a time the word target used to have many in healthcare reaching for their crucifixes, or whatever else was needed to ward off evil spirits.
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Michael White on politics
'Voters are losing patience with Labour's performance - and its excuses'
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Data briefing: Better Care, Better Value indicators
The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement recently published the Better Care, Better Value indicators for the second quarter of this financial year. They can be analysed to give some insight into what is happening across the country.
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We can work it out: dementia and the baby boomers
As the baby boomer generation ages, it will present some expensive challenges to services for people with dementia. Alison Moore reports
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Simon Stevens on powering reforms
Almost everywhere you look, it is possible to see the NHS equivalent of electricity transmission losses
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Order in the house: will legislation strike the right balance?
The supervised community treatment order is the latest legislative tool aimed at tackling 'revolving door' patients. But does it go too far? Mark Gould hears the pros and cons
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A freedom framework will unite former foes
With the debate about freedom from political interference raging, strategic health authority chief executive Mark Britnell outlines his model for compromise and wonders what an NHS charter might contain
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Anna Donald on turning cogs in a blancmange
'Most doctors would struggle to conceive of a hospital in anything other than descriptive terms'
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A year in review: catching up with the excess in 12 turbulent months
2006 has been dominated by efficiency drives and government reforms. Financial problems began to bite and the public took to the streets over attempts to revamp local services. Amid the financial storm, NHS chief executive Sir Nigel Crisp resigned and only two trusts got top marks in the Healthcare Commission's ...
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Christmas comes early, so must planning
Last year most primary care trust chief executives polled by HSJthought their local delivery plans were badly flawed by an operating framework delivered late and with significant errors in the tariff.
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Devolving central budgets
David Nicholson needs to ensure that Cinderella services have ring-fenced funding when he devolves 90 per cent of the NHS funds to local budgets.
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Patricia Hewitt's letter regarding Monitor Compliance
Your article on 7 December ( Monitor will demand service level figures from foundation trusts) refers to general comments I made during last month's NHS Alliance conference about the importance of effective partnership working in the NHS.
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Hilary Thomas on clinical management
'The gap - often a tribal or cultural one - between doctors and managers seems to be widening again, not helped by the current, and inevitable, obsession with finance.'
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Michael Mandelstam imagines the confessions of a chief executive
'I follow neither rhyme nor reason, only the health secretary. I am a member of an elite, a new breed of NHS chief executive, ruthless and efficient - not like the old softies, few of whom now remain'
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Nicolaus Henke on Michael Porter's partial answer
The Harvard Business School guru's book Redefining Healthcareis a fascinating but flawed study of reform from which the NHS could learn, says McKinsey's head of global health systems
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Comment: National directors sign up to reform
No-one ever argues with the case that clinicians at every level are integral to successful service reform. But it is a truth observed more in the intention than the action. It is therefore welcome, although a little late in the day, for the government to wheel out two national clinical ...
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Comment
Your Humble Servant: how do you solve a problem like Patricia...?
To: Don Wise, chief executive