A year ago NHS commissioning was ripped up by its roots, divided up and then pushed back into the soil. Like the plants in my garden that get such rough treatment, commissioners are struggling to flourish. The NHS provider architecture has, so far, had more gentle treatment, and the journey towards “liberalisation,” that started in […]
Category: The King’s fund
Sarah Gregory: What can we learn from how other countries fund health and social care?
England is not alone in facing the implications of an ageing population with changing patterns of illness. To inform the work of the independent commission on the future of health and social care in England, I have spent the past few months looking at how other countries are responding to these challenges. By comparison with […]
Vijaya Nath: Medical revalidation: trauma, trivia, triumph
The United Kingdom is the first country in the world to introduce the mandatory revalidation of its medical workforce. How does this process feel for those engaged in it? The King’s Fund have been exploring this question with doctors on development programmes, in masterclass events, and in a recent qualitative study and have found some […]
Richard Humphries: A year is a long time in the politics of integrated care
When Andy Burnham set out his vision for “whole person care” at The King’s Fund last year, few would have disagreed with his crisp summation of the need to move towards one service that meets people’s needs as opposed to the three very different existing services—the NHS, mental health services, and social care. The Labour […]
David Buck: Tackling health inequalities: we need a national conversation
In one of The King’s Fund’s most popular and commented on Time to Think Differently blogs last year, Gabriel Scally questioned whether we had lost the battle to tackle health inequalities. In December last year, NHS England released a document on their approach to reducing inequalities and now Public Health England has launched, rather quietly […]
Chris Ham: Making general practice fit for the future
General practice represents a paradox. On the one hand, it is widely and rightly viewed around the world as a model of primary care to be studied and emulated. On the other hand, it is based on small, independently minded units, unable to operate on the scale needed to meet changing population needs. GPs in […]
John Appleby: Care.data—your bits in their hands
Over the past few months there has been considerable debate and argument about plans by the NHS to collect and centrally collate details of individual patient records from general practice for the first time. Many have expressed worries about the care.data initiative and how potentially sensitive patient information will be used, who will have access […]
Catherine Foot: Can the Care Quality Commission live up to expectations?
This week marks one year since Robert Francis published his second report into failures of care at Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust. Mid Staffs director of quality and patient experience, Julie Hendry, gave a moving presentation at a conference at the King’s Fund in November summarising the journey that the trust have been on since 2009, […]
Vijaya Nath: Making revalidation work—what have we learnt so far?
Revalidation—the process by which licensed doctors demonstrate that they are up to date and fit to practise—was greeted with cynicism by some in the medical profession when it was introduced last year. But what have responsible officers—those who make recommendations to the General Medical Council (GMC) about doctors’ fitness to practise—thought about the process during […]
Chris Naylor: Why we cannot afford to be pessimistic about CCGs
Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have a lot stacked against them. They have taken control of the majority of the NHS budget at a time when financial pressures are mounting and there is little hope of relief in the next few years. Some GPs have gone as far as to say they are being set up […]