‘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...
As the NHS considers the findings of the public inquiry into events at Mid Staffordshire, few would disagree with Francis’ view that there is an urgent need to ensure that the NHS culture is one of pa...
‘The strength of an organization is measured not by counting the number of successes, but by its response to failure.’ Patient safety requires transparency, accountability and leadership, not gaggi...
This week I attended the Reform conference on health innovation, which got me thinking about the different ways that people interpret ‘innovation’. At the Health Foundation, the innovation we promote ...
