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Leader
Doctors’ pay: a warning from Labour’s past
In November 2002, HSJ sat opposite then prime minister Tony Blair in the cabinet room and asked him what he planned to do about consultants’ refusal to accept the new contract the government wanted to introduce.
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Leader
The three tensions the new government must resolve
The new government will need to resolve three tensions in its mission to fix the broken NHS, writes Dave West.
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Leader
The NHS needs a strong CQC
With close to £200bn spent every year on English health and care, it seems ridiculous that some believe there is no need to judge whether that investment is producing the outcomes it should. It is only human to want your boss to ‘give you the money and leave you alone’ ...
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Leader
Politicians beware: The NHS will never again meet the four-hour A&E target
The English NHS as a whole will never again achieve the target contained in the NHS constitution to admit or discharge 95 per cent of A&E attendees within four hours. In an election year, politicians of all colours, as well as NHS leaders, need to be overtly honest about this.
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Leader
Barclay has crossed the line this time
In writing directly to NHS organisations effectively instructing them to stop recruiting to equality, diversity and inclusion roles Steve Barclay has taken a step which is as unacceptable as it is unwise.
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Leader
How to read between the lines of the Hewitt review
The first thing to remember when embarking on reading Patricia Hewitt’s comprehensive and compelling review of ICS autonomy is how it came about.
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Leader
The year of the great distraction
That 2023 will be the fourth in a series of increasingly brutal years for the service will come as no surprise to HSJ readers.
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Leader
The Hewitt review could fundamentally change the way the NHS operates
To understand the nature and importance of Patricia Hewitt’s review of the role of integrated care systems announced last week it is necessary to understand its highly unusual genesis.
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Leader
The NHS is not living with covid, it’s dying from it
Some of the covid control measures taken in the past two years need to return, argue Dr Kamran Abbasi, editor of the British Medical Journal, and HSJ editor Alastair McLellan.
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Leader
Steve Barclay is NHS leadership’s worst ‘nightmare’
Never has a politician arrived in the post of health secretary trailing a worse reputation among NHS leaders than Steve Barclay, writes Alastair McLellan.
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Leader
The stubbornness of covid leaves the NHS with brutal choices to make
In the last six months of 2021, just over 5,000 people who tested positive for covid were admitted to English hospitals each week on average.
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Leader
The Messenger review is a con
“NHS to face biggest shake-up of leadership in decades”, declared the Financial Times – the paper with perhaps the most stringent editorial standards in the world – of Wednesday’s Messenger review. The Daily Telegraph also hailed it as “a landmark report”, while the BBC described how health and social care ...
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Leader
Pritchard’s NHS England: A stocktake
A stocktake of NHS England and its leadership, 10 months after Amanda Pritchard took over as chief executive.
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Leader
Dr Fuller sets out ICSs’ inheritance, and it’s tough
Claire Fuller seeks to underline a new era for primary care under integrated care systems — and it’s going to be a difficult one.
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Leader
ICSs face irrelevance unless the devolution frenzy is curbed
Integrated care systems face becoming lost in a jungle of Byzantine governance – and becoming irrelevant to current challenges – unless the current mantra of devolution and subsidiarity is curbed.
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Leader
This Easter will be worse than any winter for the NHS
Two years ago the first wave of the covid pandemic reached its peak. The NHS had reacted with impressive speed to prepare for an influx of patients with an infectious disease that few knew much about, had no cure for, and for which there was no known vaccine.
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Leader
Sorry, not sorry
The non-apology has arrived to squat on British public discourse like a particularly ugly and unwanted toad.
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Leader
The U-turn on covid vaccination will leave a toxic legacy of mistrust
‘We’ve broken the social contract between the NHS and its people’. That was the blunt conclusion of one senior NHS figure surveying the aftermath of the government’s U-turn on the mandatory vaccination of staff.
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Leader
What the rejection of ICS jobs by acute chiefs tells us
Cast your minds back five years. Sustainability and Transformation Plans are a relatively new thing and NHS England has announced the leaders for the new powers in the land.