Posts Tagged targets
Target failed? Let’s have more of them!
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 28/05/2009
Perhaps this blog is a bit of a cop-out. Yes, it’s not really a blog at all, suffice to refer you to this brilliant article by Nigel Hawkes, former health editor of The Times, in this week’s BMJ. An eloquent exposition of what this blog has argued time and time again when it comes to the NHS.
Here’s a extract to tempt you…
Why are so many heads rolling?
Posted by Anastasia de Waal in Education on 09/03/2009
On Friday the Times Educational Supplement brought to our attention the numbers of secondary school head teachers removed from their posts last year: a staggering 150. The article claims that it is generally heads of challenging schools not ‘turning their schools around fast enough’ who have suffered. Surely with this kind of ‘pro-active’ behaviour the British state school system should be safely on its way to excellence. However, some might say this sudden proliferation of head teachers losing their jobs is deeply alarming.
Targets in healthcare: more harm than good?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 19/02/2009
One of the most pervasive beliefs in government is that quality in the NHS is a function of individuals who need buttons pressed and levers pulled by targets to deliver optimal performance. This is misguided. The most intractable problems in health care—the lack of communication, leadership, and teamwork; the lack of integration; and the lack of any meaningful, patient focused, quality framework—are systemic or cultural. And targets have only made them worse. If you treat people like knaves and pawns, they will behave like them.
Continued at bmj.com.
A small step, but where’s the giant leap?
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 25/06/2008
The Conservatives made a first small step in the right direction on NHS policy yesterday, reaffirming their pledge to scrap the endless targets that have – to not put too fine a point on it – bludgeoned the life out of the health service over the past decade or so; and instead focus on outcomes. As this blog has written many times – such as here and here – targets are a sure way to demoralise staff and distort clinical priorities like none other. Outcomes are what we should be looking at.
One big contradiction
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 10/01/2008
Reading John Carvel’s interview with Alan Johnson in Society Guardian this week, one could be forgiven for supporting this government on the NHS. He does seem, at least on the superficial level, to get it. It’s funny how every recent Secretary of State for Health has gone into the job with a very ‘nicey-nicey’ approach to the NHS and then, six months to a year or so down the line, realise it’s not going to reform itself and that Blair didn’t introduce competition just for kicks.