The urgent and emergency care system is under severe pressure. Performance on a number of important indicators, including the four hour wait and ambulance handover targets, is heading in the wrong direction. Demand is growing and calls for work to be shifted out of hospital look oddly out of line with a system that cannot […]
Category: The King’s fund
Chris Ham: Medical leadership must move from the margins to the mainstream
A new report from the health services management centre at the University of Birmingham and The King’s Fund, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, provides a comprehensive and up to date picture of the state of medical leadership in NHS trusts today. Thirty years after the Griffiths report set out a vision of […]
Partha Kar: The consultant of the future
Type “define an NHS consultant” into Google and you’ll get more than 5 million results—none of which actually crystallises what the role involves. It’s a term that’s ever more shrouded in ambiguity as the NHS morphs and changes while moving into the unknown future. […]
Vijaya Nath: Revalidation: opportunity or challenge?
On 3 December 2012, the UK was the first nation, and the General Medical Council (GMC) the first regulatory body, to implement large scale changes to the regulation of its medical workforce. By April 2016 it is expected that the “vast majority” of the UK’s 220,000 doctors would have undertaken revalidation—the process by which licensed […]
Candace Imison: Will 2013 be the year of meaningful public engagement with service change?
The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) is the latest to join the growing chorus of medical colleges calling for change in hospital services with RCS President Professor Williams’s statement launching their new report: “2013 needs to be the year patients, politicians, clinicians, and managers come together to support historic change in the NHS and create […]
Nick Goodwin: Jumping the gun in the telehealth steeplechase?
If the adoption of telehealth were an Olympic sport, it would probably represent the steeplechase—an endurance event with obstacles that do not fall over when hit and with a 3.5 metre wide pit of water to jump across on almost every lap. Whilst many have been brave enough to try out for the event, most […]
Chris Ham: Integrated care North and South of the border
Proponents of integrated care in England sometimes look to Scotland as an example to be emulated. Yet, while the Scottish NHS has a much simpler structure that ought to facilitate integrated care, the reality is rather different. A report by the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission published in 2011 found that community […]
Anna Dixon: Evolution or revolution: the story behind the Health and Social Care Act 2012
It was often difficult to know who to believe during debate about the Health and Social Care Bill. The public were faced with baffling technocratic details from government with no accompanying compelling narrative to explain the need for such significant reforms, alongside sensationalised claims from some who opposed it that the bill spelt the end […]
Angela Coulter: Please stop muddling shared decision-making and provider choice
Government departments are barred from making policy announcements during elections, so there’s always a flurry of them after the purdah period has ended. The aftermath of the recent local government elections was no exception. Hot on the heels of the publication of the long-awaited NHS Information Strategy came a document entitled No decision about me […]
Vijaya Nath: The secret of Kaiser Permanente’s success
Much has been written about the integrated healthcare system that the Kaiser Permanente health group makes possible in the eight states and nine regions which it serves in America. But what did the participants who ventured to Kaiser in our recent study tour learn from the experience? And what is the value of taking NHS […]