Skip to main content

The stormy seas of healthcare commissioning

I've just written a piece for PLC, the leading legal information service. My brief was 1) explain the NHS and 2) explain where commissioning has come from and where it is going. My audience was local authority lawyers who may not be familiar with either of these topics. So it was one of the most ambitious pieces of work I've done for some time. It was also the longest for some time, at 5,500, although this is a tiddly wordcount for the subject matter. I suspect an MRI scan would find certain parts of my brain have grown during the course of writing it like a cab driver learning the knowledge! Anyway, here it is if you want to take a look: Health and Social Care Bill: commissioning and the health care market in the post-reform NHS. The more I look at health reform the more fascinated I am. It will, in its own way, be co-created by government, public sector staff, communities and the private sector. Just how it will come out is anyone's guess. There is such a mixture of good and bad ideas in it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

After Footlocker and JD Sports, is the NHS next?

Just ghosted an opinion piece for CIHM which has gone up on Guardian professional. Do we really want patients to think of themselves purely as customers, with the potential for footstamping and tantrums that entails? It may have some short-term benefits but ultimately it encourages mindless individualism, the last thing the NHS needs. What is needed is true patient engagement and consumerist discourse works against that. Check the full argument out - by CIHM's brilliant Becky Malby and Irwin Turbitt - here .

Published in the Grauniad.

My Stories of the World piece has now appeared in Society Guardian. The article focuses in on the Foundling Museum project, where looked after children met abandoned children, now in their eighties, who had been in care at the Foundling Hospital. There is also a picture gallery of the young people's work - not the best quality pics unfortunately, but it tells a moving story. The Guardian did a strange edit on the first half so if you think any of the sentences in the first half look odd - as my dad did, it seemed to be all he noticed! - that's why. But I still love you Guardian.

Face to face with a great feminist

I'm interviewing academics at the University of East London for a research brochure. The other day I met someone called Barbara Taylor. "So what's the real world impact of your book going to be?" I asked chirpily. "Well, it's going to be published by Penguin," she replies. "It's about mental health, a mixture of historical study and memoir as I've spent three years researching the asylum system, and I was in Friern Barnet hospital in the 1980s. Books like that tend to attract a lot of attention." She's only The Barbara Taylor - world famous historian of feminism! Actually I've never heard of her, but one has a way of noticing when one is the presence of brilliance and a quick google afterwards confirmed I had been. The book is about how we look after each other - everyone needs looking after, mental health is just one example of that. She says that question is nothing new, it's always been a preoccupation of feminism. But th...