A recent Financial Times news story illustrated how difficult it can be to encourage competition as a spur for systemic quality improvement in regulated markets. The FT reported that in a four-week...
The phone call was in hushed tones. ‘It’s chaos at NHS England’ they said. I wasn’t sure what was meant, but I had a good idea. ‘They’re reconstructing the NPSA systems because people have suddenly re...
Perhaps one of the mostly hotly debated issues before and since the publication of the Francis Inquiry report has been the question of whether there should be nationally set minimum nurse staffing lev...
2013 will go down as a year when the NHS did a lot of soul searching. In February, Sir Robert Francis QC published his report following the Mid Staffordshire Public Inquiry. The Inquiry uncovered a...
2013 has seen a continued recognition of the critical role that human factors plays in safety science. But although aligned with the ‘safety agenda’, human factors offers so much more to an organisati...
The new year started with a clear warning about the impact on the NHS of rising numbers of people living with long-term conditions: the costs of delivering current models of care are increasingly reco...
The health service is awash with data – data about performance, processes, outcomes, staff and patients. There is a centrally dictated requirement to measure certain aspects of care, such as waiting t...
‘The fundamental goal of healthcare is to increase value. We must define value as the outcomes that matter to patients divided by the cost of achieving those outcomes.’ This is the central thesis of M...
Earlier this month came a report from the BBC of a porter at Northern Ireland's biggest accident and emergency department, who said he was ‘fed up watching our nurses cry’ following problems in the un...
It’s often said that the NHS isn’t an organisation but a network of organisations – a system, if you like. There are of course good and bad parts in any system, and in this and my next blog I want to ...
