In my career, I have spent 10 years as an NHS hospital chief executive. I have worked to turn around some very challenged organisations, and worked as a system leader. I am also a doctor. When I ta...
'We are in the century of the system!' declared Dr. Atul Gawande in his 2014 BBC Reith Lectures. And there is indeed much talk today of health and care systems, thinking systemically, complex adapt...
Last week the Institute for Government (IfG) and the Health Foundation brought Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health, together with three of his predecessors to discuss the 'toughest job i...
This morning, the leadership cadre of the NHS assemble in Liverpool for their annual stocktake at the NHS Confederation conference. Over the past week some of the key players in the system have bee...
This is the second of two blogs I have written on turning ideas for improvement in health care into practice. In the first, I looked at how we can harness the power of people and place to improve c...
This is the first of two blogs I have written because of my increasing frustration with the failure to take up excellent ideas in health care. There is no shortage of creativity when it comes to id...
Clinical practitioners are no strangers to change. A major challenge facing any clinician in the 21st century is staying abreast of their field of work. With the so called ‘half-life’ of clinical s...
No-one would claim that changing culture is easy, but it is possible. And in light of Robert Francis’s latest report we know that there is still much to be done if we are to create the learning cul...
It’s nearly 15 years since the NHS Plan set out the blueprint for a national agency tasked with applying quality improvement techniques across the NHS. In its heyday, the Modernisation Agency was r...
I’m rarely stuck for words, but recently I found myself struggling when a friend of mine (a director in an NHS foundation trust) asked, ‘How can we possibly plan for the next few years?’ We had bee...
