With NHS budget increases levelling off pre-credit crunch and now with the crunch itself, there has never been a more important time, in recent years at least, to be thinking about how to manage scarce healthcare resources for maximum gain to patients and the wider community. […]
Tag: NHS
Julian Sheather on top-up payments
Every so often a story comes along that unexpectedly sheds light on a far more widely shared unease. Top-up payments is one of those stories. For many years we have lived, more or less happily, with a simultaneous headline commitment to an NHS that is free to all on the basis of need, an implicit […]
Tauseef Mehrali on the universal strategy
With the month of fasting behind me and afternoon blood sugar levels now soaring above 3mmol/l, I’m really quite getting into the swing of general practice. It’s the Russian roulette of the medical world. Your fate is simultaneously within and way beyond your control. After all, it was you that called that patient in during […]
Tessa Richards: Postoperative posting
Sarah Palin may have raised the profile of female politicians, but I’m lifting my glass to the girls who saw me through surgery last week. I did spot the odd male among the panoply of health professionals who looked after me, but they were thin on the ground. From the consultant surgeon and anaesthetist to […]
Julian Sheather: Free NHS care for asylum seekers
It runs like an uneasy theme in the ethics of health care provision. How do we respond to the genuine health needs of individuals who do not have legal rights of residency and are unable to pay privately for their own health care? What obligations, if any, do we have to sick people who are […]
Richard Smith: Are we all Thatcherites now?
A friend, possibly drunk, recently sent me a message on Facebook to ask if I was a Thatcherite. Thatcher was in the news because of the debate about her state funeral. Hours later my friend sent a second message hoping that she hadn’t offended me. Eventually the next morning she rang me, desperate to be […]
Joe Collier: A stab at future UK Drug Pricing Policy
We are now into the fifth month of the negotiations to reform the secretive and perverse (and essentially discredited) UK Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS), and we can safely assume that the discussions will be hotting up as the new terms must be in place by the beginning of September. […]
Edward Davies: Bringing the mountain to the managers
The annual NHS Confederation shindig was set to be the usual trawl through the good, the bad and the really pretty mediocre of the NHS, when something rather different caught my eye. […]