Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

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 »

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 »

Leaving aside the knockabout comedy value of a Secretary of State being brought up before a panel whose job it is to look after the rules that his own Government has agreed to……there is an important set of principles about the nature of the NHS that are being tested at the present time.

At the moment the NHS half believes it is a single organisation in which everyone can be told what to do, and half believes that it is a system where people don’t obey a set of management instructions from the top, but work to a set of transparent rules which make it work.
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One of the interesting issues about leadership is the way in which leaders can become known not only for their own reasons for doing things, but also the reasons their allies and supporters give for their actions. This is usually under the heading of the phrase ‘by their friends shall ye know them’.

At the moment it is interesting to note who the Secretary of State has as his friends in trying to impose his own personal preference for the NHS as preferred provider on all those who commission health care for NHS patients.
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