Archive for category Health
Baby On Board
Posted by Annaliese Briggs in Education, Health on 27/09/2010
“For two marks, spell and define ‘pre-eclampsia,’ and a bonus point for anyone who can explain the difference between a breech and normal delivery,” instructs a midwife from a blackboard to a small class of two pregnant girls and a young boy who would otherwise be sat outside the headteacher’s office (the absentees were either suffering from morning sickness or male and in a maths lesson).
Mergers offer no guarantee of ‘savings’ for NHS
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 23/09/2010
The HSJ revealed yesterday that eight London Primary Care Trusts, under guidance from NHS London and the Department of Health, are to effectively merge to ‘save £48m’. This comes after Sir David Nicholson, NHS Chief Executive, last week wrote to NHS managers effectively encouraging Strategic Health Authorities, such as NHS London, to ‘direct’ PCTs to share management functions and merge in all but name.
Such a move is understandable in light of the Coalition Government’s plans to disband PCTs from 2013 and hand over commissioning powers to new consortia of GPs, but is likely to add to the chaos of reorganisation rather than diminish it. It may be effective in London, where PCTs have for sometime collaborated in the commissioning of secondary care, but elsewhere,where they have not, past evidence suggests big problems: reduced financial control and lower quality care.
Probophilia
Posted by James Gubb in Education, Health, Politics on 18/08/2010
In this article, written for Civitas, Dr Peter Davies and Dr Adrian Kenny, two GPs from Yorkshire, draw on an amusing medical analogy – probophilia – to describe a painful affliction across UK public services today – not least the NHS. ’The probophile’, Davies and Kenny write, ‘ places false confidence in numbers , and uses these as his focus for justification of activity, whilst losing sight of what the organisation is actually set up to deliver. The sufferer is either oblivious to his affliction, or if aware falls into learned helplessness and just does what the organisation demands (and sometimes cynically pockets the cash). Fundamentally it is based on the ability of spreadsheets to analyse data without any matching ability going into primary thought about what data is being measured or why it counts for anything’. Have a read: it is unnervingly widespread and surely represents one of the biggest challenges the Coalition Government faces.
The NHS: going Dutch?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 16/08/2010
Good article in the FT today by Nick Timmins on possible future direction of NHS… competing health insurers (or GP consortia) along the lines of the acclaimed Dutch health system. For a bit more flesh on the bones as to how such a transformation could be achieved have a read of this book and article published by Civitas 3 years ago. This article by Gwyn Bevan of the LSE is also worth a scan.
Narayana Hrudayalaya: a lesson for the NHS
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 11/08/2010
Long has this blog argued the benefits of increased specialism in the way health care is delivered; that is, for example, for focused centres for operating on particular conditions and disease-specific networks that treat and help people manage chronic diseases. Evidence, contained particularly in Clayton Christensen’s brilliant book The Innovator’s Prescription, has long suggested such centres offer better and cheaper health care than the 19th century district general hospital model of every hospital trying to do everything. Senior clinicians also appear to agree.
Free milk hasn’t worked
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education, Health on 09/08/2010
Fairly extraordinarily, the white stuff at the top of the contentious topics list has proven to be milk. Barely out of the ‘breast is/isn’t best’ debate reignited by a militant supermodel, and we’re onto the next milk row: free milk for under-fives.