Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

This phrase was first used on posters and “buttons” in all of the offices where Bill Clinton’s staff worked during the 1992 election campaign. It was a reminder to them all that whatever they talked about internally during the campaign the issue that worried the American people was the economy – and that given the importance of talking to the electorate about the things that worry them it’s stupid not to recognise that. Read the rest of this entry »

First I should say that I have some historical interest here. I was an executive director in the London SHA when this trust was created by the merger of three existing trusts. The trusts that were merged were not viable. But the trust that the merger created has also turned out not to be viable and I think we should have been more aware of this at the time. When the NHS did not really know what to do it merged problem hospitals into a single institution. (As you will see from my comments below, this is something the NHS still does all the time). Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I went to an interesting seminar that was looking specifically at how to develop the case for extra public spending on social care for the elderly.

The seminar was held under Chatham House rules (you are allowed to report what was said but not who said it) which meant that people with a variety of different relationships to decision-making could say not only what they really thought but also what they really thought was going to happen. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the important aspects of rising to the Nicholson Challenge – raising between £15-20 billion from within the NHS budget over 5 years – is that it is now clear that the idea of this being a discrete challenge over a period of time, is coming to an end. Read the rest of this entry »

The phrase “developing the NHS during the long age of austerity” was one that I first used in December 2011. It’s one to which I will return frequently over the next few months. Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers of the blog will not be surprised that I am returning to the problem of the Government’s narrative about the NHS. What story is it trying to tell? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the outcomes of the Government’s June 2011 reform of its July 2010 NHS reforms has been the increased centralisation of Government control. As I will explore later in the week, the first set of reforms that was intended – in the heady days of July 2010 – to liberate the NHS and localise decision making is now set to provide much more national centralisation of commissioning than has ever previously existed. Read the rest of this entry »

Luckily this blog does not have to engage too deeply with the politics surrounding the Coalition Government’s policy on public expenditure cuts. That means the efficacy or otherwise of last Saturday’s TUC march and the Labour Opposition’s policy on the cuts is not a core issue for us. Read the rest of this entry »

July 7^th has seen the first of the attacks from both sides that the Government health team will experience for the duration of their stay in charge of the Department. How they deal with both of these attacks will determine whether their stay in charge of the NHS is measured in weeks or years.
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At first sight the Government’s plan – published on May 20^th – appears to provide a confused answer to the question of who is going to commission NHS health care from 2012.
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