Madness in Staffordshire
The health service in Staffordshire has gone through a turbulent decade and sadly a solution to having stable, sustainable acute care is as far away as ever. This is despite many millions spent on...
View ArticleFurther Madness in Staffordshire
The procurement exercise in Staffordshire which outsources the commissioning of £1.2 bn of NHS services has at last made the mainstream media. An announcement has been made that it has been decided...
View ArticleOur Care System – Issues for Incoming Labour Government
There is a growing sense that our NHS is performing less well that it should, many attributing this to the stewardship of the Coalition. The public cares about waiting times and access and about...
View ArticleCommission on the Future of Health and Social Care in England
The Barker Report is close in its general argument to the policy position of the SHA especially in key areas:- as a matter of policy social care should be free as with health care and this should be...
View ArticleTTIP Procurement and our NHS
To avoid potential misunderstandings I am clear that anything that US Corporations might agree to must be opposed. And healthcare and markets can never sensibly be reconciled. Anyway. The Transatlantic...
View ArticleTories Regret NHS Changes!!! Read All About It
Those who read the Times today can see further justification for one of our arguments – that the mainstream press don’t understand the NHS. Just for clarification then. The Lansley proposals were...
View ArticleCost of the Market Yet Again
Sadly we have had yet another rounds of claims that £10bn could be saved if the NHS market was removed in England. Yet again the only basis for the claim is one line in a report from a Health...
View ArticleForwards or Backwards?
The NHS Five Year Forward View– the Stevens Plan – is better than we feared but worse than we hoped for. Let’s start positive and say that much of the analysis sounds correct and highlighting the huge...
View ArticleDaily Mail claims on Welsh NHS
Welsh Government response to Daily Mail claims There are nearly 1,400 people in Wales who have been waiting more than a year to get NHS treatment, recent Lib-Dem figures show. In England there are 574...
View ArticleOur Plan not the Stevens Plan
The Stevens Five Year Forward Look for the NHS has had a generally favourable reaction for what it contained and some scepticism about what it didn’t. We should welcome the clear signal that more...
View ArticleTwo Bills
Clive Efford’s Bill being voted through hopefully marks the beginning of the end of the era of market experimentation with our NHS. The end of the failed decades long experiment with purchasing as...
View ArticleFairy Story
When the post war boom ground to an end the initial response was to turn left for solutions. Somehow the capitalists managed to thwart this trend and convinced enough people that neo-liberalism was the...
View ArticleKeep the Split?
The purchaser/provider split for healthcare was introduced early in the 1990’s, tied into the ideas around greater efficiency through competition between providers in some kind of market; good...
View ArticleHinchingbrooke, George Eliot and Liars
In the summer of 2013 the trade unions led a major campaign to prevent the “franchise” of George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton. We were told that a franchise was the only possible solution for the Trust...
View ArticleHistory (as interpreted by Irwin) Repeats Itself?
In 1997 Labour was elected to save the NHS. It came into power after a failed reorganisation, a long period of gross underfunding, general hostility to the public sector and an alienated workforce....
View ArticleWhat Plan?
Those who listened to Andy Burnham’s Kings Fund speech can only have been encouraged and even a bit excited – but remember it only becomes real if Labour wins the election and probably only if Andy is...
View ArticleThoughts after the Kings Fund Epiphany
The Socialist Health Association was amongst the first to come out and resolutely oppose the Equity and Excellence Liberation nonsense that eventually became the Health & Social Care Act. At the...
View ArticleFreedom to Hide Information
There has been a growing campaign to ensure that all organisations that accept our money to deliver public services should have to abide by the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA)....
View ArticleCost of the Market in our NHS
We appear to be edging to a consensus that even with heroic “savings” our care system needs significantly more funding. In an era of austerity and tax resistance that is hard but has to be discussed....
View ArticlePlans, Views, and our policy
We now have Labour’s Ten Year Plan but also St. Stevens Vision in the 5 Year Forward View. (It’s a bit worrying that in the run up to the general election we have policy development by the...
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