The abandoned illness?
For years the word ‘schizophrenia’ has been whispered, with people either ignorant or fearful of what it means. Many families have often kept it a secret due to the stigma that surrounds it. Yet this ...
For years the word ‘schizophrenia’ has been whispered, with people either ignorant or fearful of what it means. Many families have often kept it a secret due to the stigma that surrounds it. Yet this ...
A recent comment posted on the Health Foundation website in response to Peter Griffith’s piece on measuring the quality of nursing asked: ‘Do we really want to measuring quality in nursing or the over...
A few weeks ago every Boeing 787 ‘Dreamliner’ around the world was grounded on safety concerns. As the NHS gears up for the imminent release of the Francis Inquiry report, the Dreamliner holds importa...
‘We have still not moved away from a culture of blame’. So says Robert Francis in his erudite, if voluminous, report into the failings at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust published earlier t...
There’s a tendency in the NHS to be ruthlessly target-driven. Often, it goes like this: a scandal or a public outcry leads ministers to demand improvement, a 'magic bullet' metric is identified, and p...
Any doubts we might have had about the scale and reach of the Francis Inquiry were put to rest at around 11.35am on Wednesday 6 February, when the final report was laid before Parliament and laid bare...
At last week’s National Voices conference, David Nicholson asked why it is that people will spend hours and weeks researching and planning a holiday, or purchasing a new car, but don't put the same ef...
Patient safety is a global concern as healthcare organisations still struggle to deliver safe care. Similar to the UK, a significant number of patients in Norway, where I work, are harmed while receiv...
Last Friday I attended the steering committee meeting for the Northern Ireland Quality 2020 strategy. The strategy, developed in 2011 and approved following consultation, has many parallels with the a...
There are moments when you sense that we might be on the edge of some genuine transformation. For me, last week’s Reform conference was one of them. The theme was the ‘new NHS’ and considered the l...