Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

This post continues my interest in the role that leading organisations in the medical profession have in trying to persuade the Government to come out against competition and especially the introduction of new entrants into the NHS.

If the BMA really believed in their position of being both against the private sector providing services and competition, there seem to me to be a number of powerful things they could do. The first would be to ban their members from taking part in private medicine. By this single action they would greatly restrict the impact of the private sector on British health provision, thereby advancing a policy they favour. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent some of Tuesday afternoon watching a webcast from the BMA special representative meeting and I must say I am really glad that they didn’t have webcams in the trades unions and political congresses and conferences when I was engaged from the late 60s to more recent times. Read the rest of this entry »

Over recent years we have heard a great deal (and quite right too) about the importance of clinical leadership. It’s true that the NHS needs much more at every level.

But we have not heard so much about the equally important experience of clinical “followership”. Whilst it’s true we need hundreds of very good clinical leaders, it’s also the case that we need thousands of very good clinical followers. If you have the former without the later you don’t really get much leadership. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the oddest experiences for any Secretary of State for Health is the reception that they get from the BMA. Of course you’d expect the BMA to protect its member’s interests by negotiating hard for terms and conditions. That is after all what all trades unions are meant to do. But the much odder experience for a Secretary of State is how the BMA starts to act when you develop a policy which their members have asked for. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last week I have run four different sessions about the development of GP Commissioning Consortia.; one to a PCT Board, one to the senior managers of a PCT; one to a local authority and the fourth to a regional group of PCT staff whose job it is to develop and make markets.

This was an interesting set of experiences since, whilst they were different audiences, there were some similarities in the experience. Read the rest of this entry »

At all times in the development of the NHS this is an important issue. The NHS depends on all its staff for it to work at all – let alone well. So for it to produce any outcomes at all it depends upon the active involvement of hundreds of thousands of staff at all sorts of grades. Read the rest of this entry »