Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Sometimes events with potentially disastrous outcomes are described as a “car crash waiting to happen”. Over the last year this phrase has often been used about the NHS reforms. Read the rest of this entry »

So how does this simplification look in respect of commissioning?

If you are a Tory MP you will look back to July 2010 and remember a White Paper which rang out loudly with some important truths about getting rid of bureaucracy in the NHS. At the time the Government was announcing its revolutionary plans to reform the NHS. Whilst no-one, including Tory MPs was too clear about what health care problem the reforms were meant to solve, they were at least clear that they wanted to remove layers of bureaucracy form the NHS. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Yesterday we woke up to the main item on the 6 o’clock news on the Today programme being the fact that the Royal Colleges of Nursing and Midwives both  want the Government NHS reforms stopped completely. The newsworthiness of this announcement was that in the past the nursing colleges had had criticisms of the Bill – but now they were completely against it. Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly a year ago, at the end of January, during the Health and Social Care Bill second reading in the House of Commons a number of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs, following their briefing from Government whips, all made the same point about what they hoped from the Bill.  Each of them said that part of their local hospital had been threatened with closure – or actually been closed = and they knew that under this Bill such closures would not have happened.

That was why they were supporting the Bill. Read the rest of this entry »

As I said on Monday, in a few months’ time the Government will look back at the struggle it had to get the Act through Parliament and see it as a really easy risk—free activity compared to its implementation.

By the time the Bill is passed there will be about a year left for most of its implementation to take place from 1 April 2013.

There is a lot of complex new activity to develop in that year. Read the rest of this entry »

If the Health and Social Care Bill passes through Parliament before Easter, it will mark the end of a political period in NHS politics. For the last 18 months it has been possible to define one’s overall political position as being for or against the Bill. This has meant that the Labour Party has been able to define its policy on the NHS through its stance on the Bill. That is perfectly legitimate for an opposition party. The Government proposes and the opposition – usually – opposes.

Given that the election took place in May 2010 it is also legitimate for an opposition to spend some time working through its policy rather than setting out its stall so far in advance of another election. 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 »

Over the Christmas break a couple of people used a very powerful political metaphor to explain to me why they think it was inevitable that the Conservatives would mess up their reform of the NHS.

The analogy, now 40 years old, springs from the way in which long term peace was made between the People’s Republic of China and the US in the early 1970s. Only my very oldest blog readers will remember that after World War 2 civil war in China continued with Chairman Mao and the Communists eventually winning on the mainland. The defeated nationalists retreated to the island of Taiwan. The US did not recognise Communist China, choosing instead to recognise Taiwan as representing the Chinese state. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the first things I should say is that if we look back a year and think about the predictions made in early January 2011, it demonstrates that trying to predict the future politics of the NHS is a mug’s game.

Back in January 2011 the Government had just published its Health and Social Care Bill. The Bill was a true reflection of the White Paper that had been published the previous July and contained the ‘revolutionary’ changes outlined in it. Everyone was pretty confident about the reform programme – which had just been vetted by Oliver Letwin. Read the rest of this entry »