Varya Shaw

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...

Been writing about public health for HSJ. Compared to the NHS white paper, which was a gripping if frightening read, the public health white paper is quite frankly boring. But that is partly just style. What is actually happening is fascinating - public health is returning to its ancestral home in local government. Power tussles are taking place between directors of social services and the new directors of public health. Health improvement and public health commissioning advice are opening up to any willing provider (or any qualified provider). Most strikingly, this localist coalition is setting up municipal public health with lots of responsibility, very little money and virtually no national legislative support. Health and wellbeing boards could make up for this by being powerful entities that ensure decision-making is high profile and in the public interest, and can challenge central government. But if they are not, the future doesn't look so bright.

I met Sebastian St John-Clarke of Paper Plane Communications the other day. We were shooting the breeze about social media as you do and he was complimentary about my social media experience. It stood up ok, with one exception - I had only 4 followers on twitter! The final straw came when a friend told me everyone is leaving Facebook because it's "so noughties'. So find me at @varya1 , where I will be microblogging about ... well, I'll have to work that out as I go along!

Have just written an article for Construction News on property vehicles. It's the news analysis, State property revolution looms large . The government wants to secure huge savings by managing its built estate more efficiently. Fantastically interesting - partly around the complex deals that already exist and will have to be worked through, partly around the new styles of partnership that could emerge. But where I was particularly grabbed was around the culture change that may need to take place on the supplier side. Can construction firms and contractors champion government goals around efficiency, can they battle civil service inertia on behalf of the executive? It's not what they normally do!

I recently wrote an article about research by the Centre for Innovation in Health Management into how NHS leaders feel about the white paper, Liberating the NHS. Not sure if I can post it up here because of copyright. But it was utterly fascinating - the usual CIHM style of using language and metaphors well to give a really vivid, gripping description of what they found. Basically these leaders were split within themselves over what was going to happen because it just wasn't clear. Not in a vague sense - in a quite profound sense of 'what on earth are they up to?' But would add some of the leaders CIHM spoke to were pretty optimistic, at least with one half of their two minds! Find more about the report on the CIHM website here.

How will the Big Society affect the cultural diversity of museum volunters? Probably favourably - as long as the money is there, which we know it probably won't be. Read the article here.

Read to the end and this shows how museums can change young people's lives, and their children's lives, featured on Untold London . Young Londoners track Victorian Explorer