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.
The Truth About Stanley is a short drama made to raise money for homelessness. My partner Tom Clark produced it and I did the PR. We managed to get it on the front page of guardian.co.uk, and covered in the news section of The Observer. It also got a five star review in the Independent on Sunday - an unprecedented achievement for a short film. Saba Salman compares Stanley to Cathy Come Home on her blog, The Social Issue. But the wonderful Cathy is in the realist tradition, the filmic equivalent of a Zola novel about coalminers. The homelessness was triggered by bad luck and a bad system - a work injury and no safety nets. Stanley is much more psychological. It looks at why people choose a life on the streets. It is a film for this age of the mind, where we have virtual lives on the internet, neuroscience is revealing the potential of our brains in old age, and charities like Kidsco reach right into the psyches of traumatised children. I believe Sta...
Comments
Post a Comment