Archive for September, 2007
Re-dis-organisation?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 20/09/2007
The Lib Dems have today proposed scrapping PCTs and SHAs and replacing them with elected local health boards, that would also be allowed to raise extra money for local services through a local income tax. The NHS must be shuddering at the prospect of yet more organisation. On the plus side, it would undoubtedly be a step towards solving the well-documented accountability issues currently besetting PCTs: dissatisfied patients would at least be able to kick out commissioners who aren’t providing a decent local service. But it is unlikely to be a satisfactory response to the NHS’ woes.
La Mala educación
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education, Foreign Affairs on 20/09/2007
Hugo Chavez certainly knows how to shore up his socialist consensus in Venezuela for the long term: ban all schools from teaching anything else. He has already ensured that college level students won’t be able to study medicine without first pouring through Marx’s Das Kapital and some of Fidel Castro’s speeches. But his tactics for co-opting private schools into his preferred ideology could really do with some refining. After all, his aggressive stance is attracting a lot of bad press. If he had only studied New Labour tactics, he could have learnt how to bring many private schools to their knees without anyone noticing!
Some Reasons to be Cheerful
Posted by Nick Cowen in Social Cohesion on 18/09/2007
Although we rightly worry about the potentially divisive effects of faith schools, on-campus extremism, and the hateful intolerance that some Muslims show former co-religionists who leave Islam, in actuality the battle for social cohesion will be lost or won not so much by what takes place in Britain than by what happens in the Middle East.
For it has been there where the Islamist virus currently plaguing the world was first spawned, and it has been this aggressive, intolerant and supremacist ideology that ultimately fuels all demands and forms of activity by Muslims that so currently imperil social cohesion at home.
continued on the Centre for SocialCohesion blog.
Putting the record straight
Posted by Nick Cowen in Health on 17/09/2007
When questioned on Sunday AM yesterday on the subject of the report by Sir Derek Wanless , released last week by the King’s Fund, on how effectively the NHS had spent its money the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, referred to a recent study by the Commonwealth Fund:
“There was a recent study by the Commonwealth Fund which is the independent organisation in America that compared six health services in the developed world – Canada, Australia, US, Germany and New Zealand and ourselves. We came out top. We came out top on efficiency. We came out top on quality. We came out top on fairness, on equity.”
Our insecure future health
Posted by Nick Cowen in Health on 13/09/2007
In honesty, Sir Derek Wanless’ ‘review of NHS funding and performance’, released on Tuesday by the King’s Fund, tells us little we didn’t know already: that while there may have been ‘some clear and notable improvements’, the NHS, overall, is not getting much bang for its buck. ‘The NHS has failed to generate the relatively modest improvements in unit cost productivity that might have been expected’, concludes Wanless – much the same as that of previous King’s Fund publications, that of the QQUIP team at the Health Foundation, that of Reform, and even that of a tome by the author of this blog.
Taxpayers fund researchers to read cookbooks
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 12/09/2007
One of Gordon Brown’s first moves as Prime Minister was to stir that alphabet soup of government departments. The DfES* was split up, a few bits of the DTI** got mixed in and we ended up with the DCSF*** and DIUS****. One might imagine this was little more than an excuse to get some fresh headed paper, stick a new logo on the departments’ biros and create some new junior ministerial posts to reward the government’s most outspoken parliamentary supporters.