Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Today the ever helpful NHS Confederation provides the Government with some advice about its reforms. Rather than the onslaught of horror and disagreement that most other commentators offer, this is a judgement of the story to date. It recognises that there is a lot of disagreement with the Government’s position and suggests some refereeing between the Government and other stakeholders. Read the rest of this entry »

As I said in my blog on July 26^th “Liberation through conscription will not work.” Making GPs do something that they don’t want to is and was a recipe for disaster. Since there are some GPs who are , in the current Secretary of State’s words, ’enthusiastic’ about commissioning working with them will move the policy forward. Making those who don’t want to commission was daft then and is daft now. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC has just launched its own analysis on Radio 4’s Today programme examining NHS progress toward the development of competition. Nick Triggle’s report also appeared on the BBC’s website. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot of evidence that last autumn the British public enjoyed their highest ever level of satisfaction with the services of the NHS. Why is this good news so bad for the Government? Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to measure the improvement of the NHS against improvements in health outcomes it will be necessary to collect the data that show what those outcomes are.

One of the few consistencies of approach to which the new Government has adhered in its NHS reforms has been an emphasis on encouraging health services to judge their success or failure against the health outcomes that different services produce. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s posts have discussed the potential clash that is taking place on the ground as NHS reforms develop the two very different approaches represented by the work of the National Commissioning Board and the work of the GP Commissioning Consortia. This week I have posted on the two different cultures and on how GPs could be empowered in carrying out their new roles. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I am exploring the way in which the alternate power sources of the Government’s NHS reform programme have been set up to clash and conflict.

Yesterday I discussed the way in which the CEO of the NHS Commissioning Board is planning to centralise power under his control over the next two years before apparently decentralising it to GPs. Read the rest of this entry »

More analysis of the dual power system that has been set up within the NHS. Read the rest of this entry »

In late January, following on from David Nicholson’s letters to NHS CEOs, I blogged about the importance of him and the NHS Commissioning Board gripping the transition of the next two years. I posed his expectations of how the reforms would develop (though being gripped by him) and how GPs wanted to develop their own organisations in their own way. It is no secret that the vast majority of GPs hate bureaucracy and it’s no secret that David Nicholson is good at running things from the top. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday saw the clearest media analysis I have found of what is right and what is wrong with the Government’s NHS reforms.

The FT doesn’t allow me to simply copy any of their articles so I must respect that, but if you can find a copy of it, or are registered with the FT, it’s really well worth a read. Read the rest of this entry »