Health Matters | Paul Corrigan's blog

Next week will be an important week for the NHS. Two very important papers will be produced by the Government. One of which will deal with the future of the NHS and one will deal with how the NHS will work in the next financial year. Read the rest of this entry »

It was interesting that following the Government Public Health White Paper over the weekend of 3/4 December, two newspapers had articles attacking the theory of behaviour change that was behind it. They were attacking it because it advocated persuading people to change their health behaviour – rather than tougher interventions which remove choices from people. One headline read “Nudge or fudge? Public health fears as Lansley retreats from regulation”. Independent 4^th December 2010 Read the rest of this entry »

Since last Tuesday’s Nick Timmins story in the Financial Times that Oliver Letwin, (Cabinet Minister for thinking through policy) was ‘reviewing’ the NHS reform programme before the publication of the Bill, a number of people have asked me what I think is happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Apart from yesterday’s post on the overall politics of the Public Health White Paper, there are at least three further policy areas to explore:

• The National Public Health Service
• The Local public health interventions and
• How do you change people’s health behaviours?

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Tomorrow I will post the first of several comments on the nuts and bolts of the White Paper on public health published by the Coalition government on November 30th . The health of the nation is one of the most important topics that Government can address and this is an important document with several  important issues contained within it.. If fully implemented it will have an impact on the health of the country. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an interesting update to my last post which asked questions about how the Government would spin their coming Public Health White Paper. Quoting from the 2004 new Labour Public Health White Paper I was suggesting that the new Government may start to claim it as being “revolutionary” when in fact it will be merely a reconstruction of the past. Read the rest of this entry »

In the next few days we are promised a new public health White Paper and I thought, before it was published, I would draw some lessons from my experience of the last one in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

I may be wrong but I am pretty sure that Jim Callaghan, when he was in opposition to the Conservative Government from 1979, was one of the first to use the phrase that “the sky was dark with the wings of chickens coming home to roost.”

But that is now what’s happening in regard to Government policy of keeping parts of hospitals open against the previous advice of clinicians. As I posted at the time of the election, Andrew Lansley, after he became Secretary of State for Health, made an immediate tour around hospitals where significant services were being closed. During the election campaign he had said he would reopen these and would ask clinicians to look again at their plans for closure. His tour provided photo opportunities to stand in front of these hospitals and say that he was keeping his and the new local MPs promise to reopen the ward/A&E/maternity unit. Read the rest of this entry »

I had expected that during this period that those of us interested in health service reform would be simply waiting for the Bill to be finished and then published. We would then have a much clearer idea of what the Government intended and a better idea of the political battle lines as it goes through Parliament. Read the rest of this entry »

I think I should clarify something I said in last Thursday’s post on the Comprehensive Spending Review as some commentators have brought two things together and misunderstood. I’ll start the explanation by exploring why the coalition Government’s relationship with Local Government is so difficult. Read the rest of this entry »