Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Tomorrow I will post the first of several comments on the nuts and bolts of the White Paper on public health published by the Coalition government on November 30th . The health of the nation is one of the most important topics that Government can address and this is an important document with several  important issues contained within it.. If fully implemented it will have an impact on the health of the country. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an interesting update to my last post which asked questions about how the Government would spin their coming Public Health White Paper. Quoting from the 2004 new Labour Public Health White Paper I was suggesting that the new Government may start to claim it as being “revolutionary” when in fact it will be merely a reconstruction of the past. Read the rest of this entry »

In the next few days we are promised a new public health White Paper and I thought, before it was published, I would draw some lessons from my experience of the last one in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

A part of my week is spent with quite large health policy and political issues. Either writing my blog or in giving talks about the large scale changes that the NHS is going through. Interesting work on a very big scale. Read the rest of this entry »

How is the NHS doing in 2010? How do we measure up against Nye Bevan’s yardstick of wanting people to feel “serene” about their health care system?

Those of us into comparing the NHS with other health care systems know that in November every year we are going to be looking at an international league table. Read the rest of this entry »

I may be wrong but I am pretty sure that Jim Callaghan, when he was in opposition to the Conservative Government from 1979, was one of the first to use the phrase that “the sky was dark with the wings of chickens coming home to roost.”

But that is now what’s happening in regard to Government policy of keeping parts of hospitals open against the previous advice of clinicians. As I posted at the time of the election, Andrew Lansley, after he became Secretary of State for Health, made an immediate tour around hospitals where significant services were being closed. During the election campaign he had said he would reopen these and would ask clinicians to look again at their plans for closure. His tour provided photo opportunities to stand in front of these hospitals and say that he was keeping his and the new local MPs promise to reopen the ward/A&E/maternity unit. Read the rest of this entry »

The trouble with blogging is that you can end up thinking (as with its more precocious cousin twitter) that the things you do are important just because you are doing them. The reading public will be as interested in them as you are. The little voice at the back of my head often gets me editing posts that seem to simply be what I have done that day. Sometime these things are interesting – most often I am just advertising something that has just happened to me – and, because I did it, I think  it matters to you. Read the rest of this entry »

I had expected that during this period that those of us interested in health service reform would be simply waiting for the Bill to be finished and then published. We would then have a much clearer idea of what the Government intended and a better idea of the political battle lines as it goes through Parliament. Read the rest of this entry »

Managing the current change in the NHS – which will itself change part way through and will need to be managed – will lead to a constantly changing NHS.

On Monday I spoke to a regional conference of CEOs and Medical Directors of NHS organisations together with their local authority counterparts. The Conference was discussing how to manage the reform programme over the next few months given the complex nature of the changes. Some organisations that were not yet formed (GP commissioning consortia), would, over that period, come to prominence. While some of the organisations in the room would decline very speedily in influence. Read the rest of this entry »

The coalition government want to paint their picture of the Big Society as an idea which is an attack upon the left wing of politics. They would like to pretend that ‘civil society’ is their idea and ‘the state’ is the left’s and that that is the way in which they define political difference between the left and the right. In the current social and political context if the left were to fall for that political bifurcation they would be out of electoral power for several generations. Read the rest of this entry »