What does a ‘listening organisation’ look like? What benefits can it bring to our patients and to our staff? The more we involve patients, the more we make their experience of care better. We can iden...
One of my favourite quotes is William Gibson's 'The future is here, it’s just not very evenly distributed'. I saw some of that future at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield on Friday, at a pres...
Accident and Emergency Departments are backing up, GPs cannot cope with their workload, ‘out-of-hours’ services are unsatisfactory: looks like it is time to invent a new service. Shall we start wit...
The headlines last week about the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) handling of concerns at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust have reignited the debate about how to ensure healt...
Human factors, also known as ‘ergonomics’, is much more widely talked about in healthcare now than it was when my first wife died during in an attempted routine operation in 2005. When I started talki...
As I walked through the office door on Monday morning, my assistant told me that my first appointment had been cancelled. I admit to sharing some annoyance, but then he told me the person I was suppos...
The work of 1000 Lives Plus, Wales’s national healthcare improvement programme, has repeatedly emphasised the need to include patients in the design and delivery of services. The use of ‘Stories for I...
Healthcare staff are usually motivated to enter their professions by a desire to make a difference for patients and service users. Why then do they find it so hard to speak up for patients when they s...
As the NHS passes another milestone, one wonders how 2013 will be remembered. The beginning of a slow and steady decline? Or is 65 the new 45 and the time to re-think the future? At the Health Foun...
Our health and social care system in Scotland is facing challenges nationally and locally which open opportunities for change and improvement. The Quality Strategy for NHS Scotland 2010 recommends ...
