Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

The Government’s NHS reforms have done little to prevent the main change that will have to take place to ensure that our health service survives and thrives in any meaningful way in the future. That is the major reorganisation of many of the patient services that are at present delivered from NHS hospitals. In the last few days of 2012, the NHS Confederation has been putting the argument for change.   Read the rest of this entry »

On further reflection I think there is an even more important issue about the speech that Jeremy Hunt gave at the King’s Fund last week than the one that I discussed on Monday. Read the rest of this entry »

I, along with many commentators, felt that Jeremy Hunt had been made Secretary of State for Health because he was good at developing a strategic and tactical approach to communicating the Government’s message.

His predecessor failed as a reforming Secretary of State because he could not communicate to either the public or the NHS what problem his reforms were meant to solve. He was also silent on the subject of how they were going to solve it. Read the rest of this entry »

This is my third post about the mandate because I think this is such an important part of the new NHS architecture. This one is looks at it from a different point of view – in a way that could turn the whole politics of the mandate on its head. Read the rest of this entry »

I, along with what I thought were most people, assumed that last Saturday morning Jeremy Hunt made a big mistake. The main item on the news and the front page of the Times’ magazine were full of the reporting of his belief that abortions should be restricted to 12 weeks after conception. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I posted about the different way in which party political narratives about NHS reforms may develop. I expect a very different kind of debate now that the Government may have the ability to communicate some form of message about what it is trying to achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

Since Monday’s post appeared a number of people have asked me to clarify what I meant by the Government failing to make critics pay for constructing even the oddest arguments against their reforms.  What am I suggesting? What should Governments, or any other major institution  do when they are involved in an argument with opponents? Read the rest of this entry »

Many commentators have argued that the task of the new Secretary of State is a near impossible one (“his in-tray … a pyramid of hand grenades with loose pins” as Polly Toynbee put it in the Guardian on Thursday). They have argued that the fact he has been given his new job because he is a good communicator means he is bound to fail because the story he has to tell will inevitably be one of failure.

I don’t think that is necessarily true. I do think that it’s a very difficult story to develop and to tell, but being new he has a number of strong points. Read the rest of this entry »

He demonstrated every day how important it was for a Secretary of State to not only have a narrative about why there needed to be change in the National Health Service but also to have the ability to communicate that narrative to the public and the NHS.

Read the rest of this entry »

The appointment of the new Secretary of State for Health is a move away from someone who had a single idea about a policy to reform the NHS but could not communicate it (Andrew Lansley), to one that has no idea about NHS policy but communicates that very well – Jeremy Hunt.