There is a person in the patient
Care itself is an interaction between people, so the prefix of ‘person-centred’ should be implicit, but I guess we need to clarify that there is a person in the patient. Since living with several n...
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Austerity, healthcare and the Autumn Statement
Last week’s Autumn Statement, delivered by George Osborne, makes little direct reference to health, but serves to underline the challenges confronting publicly funded health services in the England. T...
Investigating patient deaths: a waste of time and money?
Last week I met James Titcombe, National Advisor on Patient Safety and Culture at the Care Quality Commission (CQC). James is perhaps better known as the father of Joshua, who died at University Hospi...
How do choice and competition drive quality in primary care?
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...
Will patient leadership cure chaos at NHS England?
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...
Minimum nurse staffing levels are only part of the picture
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...
Constant learning, continuous improvement - lessons from Francis
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...
Human factors: the way forward in healthcare and the personal price of failure on a 12 year old
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 Self Care NHS Trust - the future for NHS Choices?
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...
Shifting from counting what is measured to measuring what counts
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...
