Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Yesterday’s Independent reported an important letter from Clare Gerada, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) to the Prime Minister. In it she asked for a seat at the table to implement the Bill when it becomes law and called for an end to the vitriolic argument that has gone on. Read the rest of this entry »

The BMA’s recent letter (on 1^st March) calling into question the NHS reforms and arrangements for commissioning support was a masterpiece of its kind. At one and the same time they were anxious that the reforms gave the central state too much power over CCGs and anxious that markets were being given too much power over GPs.

I felt it summed up over 60 years of political pain that the BMA has suffered at the hands of government and markets. It must be really hard for them. Read the rest of this entry »

I can understand why most doctors and nurses don’t understand the nuts and bolts of politics. Whilst people like me were sitting in at University and generally developing the darker skills of the way in which politics works, those clinical staff-to- be were buckling down to get great  ‘A’ levels and then working hard at both the theory and practice of medicine. Then when they qualify it’s a job and a half to apply all that learning to real patients. Most medical staff are in their mid-thirties before they take a breath. Read the rest of this entry »

I try very hard to believe it but I just don’t think that leaving the NHS ‘much the same as it is today’ is really being ‘tough and bold’.

Some readers felt that I was being a bit harsh on the PM on Tuesday when I charted his failure to spot the problem that the health policy was to become on 4 separate occasions between the summers of 2010 and 2011. They felt that my suggestion that he had not really paid sufficient attention to what he was trying to achieve -because he didn’t really do the policy work – was a mite unreasonable. Read the rest of this entry »

The point I made last week was that whilst the Government may have a reform policy (in truth of course what’s really exciting about NHS reform is that at the moment the government has several contradictory policies) it has lost control of its implementation. I have posted before about the contradiction between the Government’s story (that they believe in giving power to local doctors to make decisions) and the reality of what life is like for clinical commissioning groups under the National Commissioning Board. Read the rest of this entry »

On February 29^th I gave a talk to the BBC College of Journalists. This was one of a regular series of meetings where people that have some expertise in a policy area come to talk with a range of different BBC journalists about ‘the story’ and how it is developing. Read the rest of this entry »

As the language of opposition to his Bill becomes more extreme, and as that opposition deepens and broadens, the Secretary of State for Health remains very cheerful. In fact those closer to him than me (yes, I know blog readers will be surprised to know there are a few) all report him as having been in a bad way a few weeks ago but that he is now back to his normal cheerful self. Read the rest of this entry »

10 days ago when the BMA announced its ballot on industrial action over Government proposals to change doctor’s pensions a number of friends raised the above question with me.

I didn’t post about this last week since it directly questions people’s motivation and the priorities of their politics. But during the week, on most of the days when I was working in the NHS, people raised this issue. Read the rest of this entry »

The point I have been making over the last week is that whilst the Government may have a reform policy, it has lost control of its implementation. So I am sure if you asked a Government Minister what their policy is on FTs you would find that they still believe that all trusts should become one.

The political parties that form the Coalition Government both have a chequered history when it comes to NHS Foundation Trust policy. In 2002/3 when the Labour Government was developing the legislation that created them, the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat Parties voted against the legislation all the way through to its passage. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the apparent aims of the most recent Liberal Democrat amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill being discussed in the House of Lords is to ‘stop the application of European Competition Law to the NHS’. Read the rest of this entry »