Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

As I have mentioned before’ there is a management consultant adage that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. So it was evident that at some stage in the current Secretary of State’s reform programme that some of the cultural certainties that make the NHS go round would develop a life of their own and undermine the reform programme. Read the rest of this entry »

The Government plans to bet the whole of the NHS on the belief that GPs can deliver a business model that can buy £60 billion of NHS health and improve value for money for the NHS as they do so. Given the size of this spend in this industry it is to be hoped that GPs understand how to operate in a business this size. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the responsibility of the National in the English NHS? (Part Two)

The White Paper aims at very major changes to the responsibility of the National in the English NHS. Let’s go through these one by one:

1. A National Commissioning Board will be created.
2. The Secretary of State will no longer be responsible for the day-to-day running of the NHS but will lay out a ‘short formal’ mandate for the NHS Commissioning Board. This will hold the Board to account.
3. BUT the Secretary of State keeps political control of the outcomes of all reconfigurations that political local government refers to him.
4. The Health Bill will put NICE on a firmer statutory footing securing its independence and core functions.
5. The Department will publish an information strategy.
6. The Department will create a set of tariffs (although later on this becomes the role of Monitor).
7. A National Public Health Service will be created and a public health white paper will be published this autumn.

Today I’m blogging about points 3-7 Read the rest of this entry »

One of the few consistent and long term insights that ‘management literature’ has given me is transactional analysis. Managers may be treated by those they manage as “parents” and managers can treat those they manage as “children”.  Sometimes managers are good parents and sometimes they are very bad parents.  Sometimes children are naughty and demand to be punished, and sometimes they want to leave home and set up for themselves.
Read the rest of this entry »

On September 17th the Secretary of State said that he had a preference for NHS providers over others. This change in policy has caused some concern but that debate has not been held in public. In this weeks HSJ it now surfaces in a public debate about the future of commissioning. I have written an article (1,2) and so has the Secretary of State (1,2). The editor has a leader on the topic.

I am sure this debate will contnue in public for some time now before it reaches a settled position. The Financial Times commented in an article published on 29th October 2009