I was in a meeting last week with the seven chairs of the new consortia, two other executives from the new PCT cluster, and an external consultant who was giving an independent overview of the context and the challenges, and how they might be jointly and severally addressed. The content and debate was engaging and […]
Tag: NHS
David Kerr: Would you rather work for Google or the NHS?
Would you rather work for Google or the NHS? Started in 1996 in a Stanford University student room by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the plan was originally to call the newly created search engine, BackRub. Since then Google has become one of the top 10 companies in the world (number 4 at the moment) […]
Richard Smith: The Great War and NHS reform
The Great War changed the world forever and burnt itself into our language, memory, consciousness, and understanding of life. That’s the argument of Paul Fussell’s marvelous book “The Great War and Modern Memory,” which was first published in 1975 and won the National Book Award. Before the war we had Tennyson, Kipling, Trollope, Conrad, and […]
Richard Smith: How can we encourage innovation in the NHS?
How can we encourage innovation in the NHS? Niti Pall, a GP and entrepreneur from Birmingham, asked herself this question and hit upon the idea of asking all the people she knows who might have some thoughts on the question to a meeting, putting them in a room together, letting them generate their own agenda, […]
Richard Smith: Five things about the NHS that are not sustainable
“There are five things about the NHS that are not sustainable,” said Phil Morley, chief executive of Hull and East Yorkshire Trust, in the middle of a conference last week on sustainability and health. He spoke like Cicero, only with more humour and a strong Northern accent. The conference was about environmental sustainability, but Morley […]
Richard Smith: Can the NHS become environmentally sustainable?
“We live in a world of competing sorrows,” said Daniel Moynihan, the US senator. We also live in a world of competing agendas, and the NHS has to think about saving money, increasing productivity, improving quality and access, and many other issues as well as achieving environmental sustainability. And despite their fine words, the health […]
David Kerr: UK and US healthcare- public option is the universal, high quality, and efficient way
Writers of the open letter to America in defence of the NHS rebut clearly and concisely some of the more ludicrous charges leveled against our system of healthcare. It’s a debate that on the whole leaves me cold. The idea that wittingly a Government would allow a huge chunk of its population to go without proper healthcare […]
Harry Brown on planned changes to Connecting for Health
Medicine and leading edge technologies have always gone hand in hand over the years, and with the recent explosion of information technologies, medical practice has certainly been at the forefront. Over the recent past in the United Kingdom, there has been a dramatic shift in the way medical records have been created and stored. There […]
Mark Jadav: My experience of catching swine flu
After reading my colleagues’ comments on the discussion fora of the harmfulness of playing our ace too soon, I bear the shame of being one of those low-risk (fairly) fit, (relatively) young people with a mild self-limiting viral illness who is consuming the precious stocks of Tamiflu and probably helping develop the resistant strains which […]
Sara McCafferty on priority setting
In October last year we announced the UK Forum on Health Care Priority Setting at the 7th meeting of the International Society on Priorities in Health Care. The forum is funded by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and is organised by the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University. […]