All articles by Steve Black – Page 4
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: Positive thinking will not fix the NHS
Amanda Pritchard’s speech at the NHS Confederation was full of positive thinking, but empty of priorities, in contrast to a recent report that clearly spells out what ails the NHS and how to remedy it, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The growing evidence the NHS needs more managers
A new report shows that management shortages and penny-pinching on capital spending harm the NHS front line, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
Don’t blame the Treasury: the NHS’s capital spending system is a mess
The NHS capital spending process is deeply flawed, resulting in low investment and poor planning, requiring a radical redesign to ensure efficient implementation of projects, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: A lack of financial discipline often leads to NHS deficits
Contrary to the popular view that government austerity often causes NHS deficits, the real culprit is the dearth of financial discipline in both hospitals and the Department of Health and Social Care, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: Bad data = bad policy
The NHS should pay more attention to what is measured and the quality of data collection if its wants more effective policy making and service improvement, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The one-legged stool approach to policy making
Complex systems like the NHS can’t be improved with a blinkered approach that only pays attention to one input when all the inputs interact, sometimes in intricate ways, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The NHSE primary care plan is better than you think
Steve Black analyses the recently released NHSE plan to improve primary care, what is missing in the report and which significant initiative the media and GPs failed to highlight
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: Focus, not collaboration, is the key to good strategy
Mirroring the concentration of a homeopathic medicine, NHS strategy lacks a good analysis-driven identification of problems and has a long list of ‘focus’ areas that wants to please everyone, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: Calls for more NHS staff are often misleading and dangerous
Appeals to give better resources to the NHS ‘front line’ are problematic when they divert attention away from more serious issues, especially when spending on more staff comes at the price of investing in other areas where the money may have a greater impact, emphasises Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: 12-hour A&E waits kill – their abolition should be the priority
Now that NHSE has finally started publishing honest 12-hour A&E wait reports, they should rethink their improvement strategy to focus on eliminating them, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The biggest problems in primary care are poorly understood
Steve Black highlights three interconnected problems in primary care that rarely get the attention they deserve
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The Hewitt report is more radical than you think
There is already a large volume of commentary on the Hewitt report. So I’m not going to do a general review. But I want to highlight some of the more radical ideas in it.
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: the NHS should target poor understanding, not performance
Instead of trying to understand the causes of problems, the NHS performance management process demands lots of data which only achieves ‘the illusion of control’ in NHSE, writes Steve Black
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: How not to pay for NHS pay rises
One of the most persistent problems in the NHS is that budgets for long-term improvement are regularly raided to cover short-term problems, writes Steve Black.
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The NHS needs a productivity plan, not a workforce one
The second in a new weekly column by commentator Steve Black. Historic workforce plans have ignored productivity. Most discussion seems to assume that the plan must demand far more clinical staff to drive up NHS activity while ignoring other factors
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Daily Insight
The mythbuster: The NHS leadership needs to stop thinking like the Russian army
Introducing a new weekly column by commentator Steve Black. In a single day the NHSE director of strategy claims that the system wants more autonomy for ICBs while defending strategic decisions that strip them of any capacity to be autonomous.
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