Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

On Tuesday evening I heard an inspiring speaker talk about the role he and his company are playing in the development of efficient hospitals in India. This was the third such talk I have heard over the last 6 months or so – all from Indian entrepreneurs who are driving down the cost of health care and thereby bringing it to many more people than under current provision. Read the rest of this entry »

As I commented last week, I have given up waiting for the Government to make a coherent case for its reforms. So when, in late December, the Times published the story that a new amendment had been laid in the Bill to increase the level of the private patient income cap for Foundation Trusts, I did not expect too much from the Government by way of an explanation about why this was an important and necessary aspect of the whole NHS reform programme.

I was not disappointed. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I drew some political lessons from the Hinchingbrooke takeover. Today I want to draw some lessons from the procedure that has taken so very long to come to a conclusion.

I think it’s pretty certain that over the next few years there will be a variety of different takeovers and mergers of NHS hospitals. When these have been carried out in the past they have been mainly attempts to reduce costs by forcing several organisations to merge. Most of these would not have been mergers or takeovers in any other industry or service. In the NHS mergers have usually brought together 3 failing hospitals to create a single, large, failing hospital. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday I blogged about a report which examined different approaches to losing weight, and received some interesting comments which I will talk about later in the week.

But by chance this post was published on the day that the agreement between the Government and Circle at Hinchingbrooke was finally signed and some people want to know my thoughts about this. Read the rest of this entry »

(In yesterday’s post I made the point that I felt that the Secretary of State had shifted his position and now wanted to act to stop the bad results of the variation of practice with the NHS. This met with a number of responses from readers. Some of the early Twitter comments felt I was being incurably optimistic that the Secretary of State would really begin to tackle variation of practice by radically changing hospital organisation. It’s strange to be in the position of defending a very damaged Secretary of State, but I feel he has come to this position not through choice, but because he has had to.

18 months into the job he becomes responsible for the NHS and everything that happens to it. That means that the results of the CQC inspection that was published the week before stops being ‘the fault of the Labour Government’ and becomes the fault of this Government. Given that he has now agreed a set of changes to his Bill which demonstrate that he is firmly responsible for the NHS, it’s about now in the Parliament when, so far as the public are concerned, he becomes clearly responsible.

Therefore when any credible body now criticises the NHS he will need to say what he is going to do and given that he will have to say what he is going to do, someone will start to hold him to account for it.

This will also happen to the Government in other areas of policy and economics. For as long as possible they will say that it’s the previous lot’s fault, but sooner or later the public will think that too much time has passed since the election and that argument will no longer work. This responsibility has come earlier in health than in other policy areas because the last 15 months have been such a noisy political mess over NHS reform. The public clearly know that so far as the NHS is concerned there is a new Government – because there has been so much noise and such a mess.

So my belief that the Secretary of State has changed his position on tackling variation in the NHS does not come from a naive position that he has suddenly changed his mind about his responsibility for improving bad practice. No, I believe he has started to take this seriously because the public and the voters have recognised that after 18 months in the job he is in charge. From here on in. It is his responsibility).

Today I want to comment on another part of his speech that will obviously become a theme. On 27 September I mentioned the fact that when the Secretary of State named 20 trusts that were potentially clinically and financially unstable because of PFI deals he managed – in one speech – to make the leadership of trusts come out in support of their PFI deals. Read the rest of this entry »

The relationship between profit, the NHS and health care is an important one. It would have been a very useful part of the Government’s narrative if there had been a real public debate about how profit and the NHS might intersect as a part of their reforms. But, as we know, they failed to engage with that narrative at all and now, given the Government has expended all of its leadership political capital on pausing the reforms, we will get no leadership from them in that debate.

It’s a debate in which the Conservative-led Government is embarrassed to engage. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I posted about a piece of research that examined public thinking about the issue of private sector health companies using staff trained within the NHS at public expense. The majority believed that doctors who made money in private practice should make some contribution to the public purse from their earnings if their training had been paid for by the public. Read the rest of this entry »

Education and training in the NHS use a great deal of our public resources. This investment plays not only a very significant role in developing the NHS, but also plays a much wider role in developing our society. The fact that tens of thousands of teenagers in every generation work hard to get into clinical education demonstrates the central role that the NHS plays in people’s lives. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last week, two different people have independently told me of conversations they have had with Tory MPs concerning the direction of Conservative politics for the NHS in a few years time.

The story begins with the politics of the NHS becoming increasingly difficult for the Tories. Whilst they have put the reforms to bed, the next few years are going to see increasing political strife about ‘cuts’ in the NHS.  These will be firmly linked in the public mind with the role of the Conservative Government. In reality they will have been caused by an unreformed NHS failing to improve its productivity or value for money. Read the rest of this entry »

Regular readers will have noticed that the relationship between integration and competition is an topic upon which I have posted a couple of times in the last few weeks. In my view all the commentators pointing out the importance of creating integrated care services for the NHS are correct. Read the rest of this entry »