Posts Tagged culture
When I hear the word culture, I reach for my wallet
Posted by David Merlin-Jones in Economics, Family, Marriage and the Culture, Politics on 28/10/2010
This has not been a good week for culture. A pincer movement has been occurring, with rumours that the state of Qatar is looking to buy Christie’s, and the decimation of the Arts Council. While of course unrelated, both have the potential to undermine Britain’s status as a cultural standard-bearer, the former through over-emphasising culture as a product and the latter through understating its value. In the so-called ‘Age of Austerity’, it appears that culture has stopped being a priceless necessity and become just another luxury good that can be accrued or done without. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Shocking accounts of hospital care’
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 27/08/2009
The Patients Association today releases a compendium of sixteen stories from patients that have contacted them with ‘shocking accounts of hospital care’; that, extrapolating from the hundreds of phone calls they have received in recent times and from the two per cent of patients who rate their care as ‘poor’, they say could reflect the experiences of up to one million patients between 2002 and 2008. Read the rest of this entry »
What about the NHS’s culture?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 30/04/2009
In all the talk about what the NHS is going to have to do with its tighter budgets one thing seems to be missing: the underlying culture of the organisation (or, more accurately the organisations that make it up). Discussion is focused on structures, processes and levers that the NHS has, or doesn’t have, at its disposal to drive efficiency.
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Not exactly a cultural revolution
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 13/02/2008
School children are to be mandated 5 hours of ‘culture’ a week by the latest government initiative. This hour-per-school-day prescription seems to be the government’s answer to every education issue, as it defines more and more of every state school schedule through Whitehall guidance. This follows on from the five hours of mandated sport a week designed, in part, to tackle obesity. Bureaucrats should be careful not to overdo this wheeze. After all, secondary schools still have to cope with teaching maths and English to pupils who didn’t manage to pick up those basic skills during their …err… compulsory numeracy and literacy hours at primary school!