Nhs

One of the patients I see regularly as a voluntary hospital visitor, who has been in hospital for weeks, seems to be getting better. Still skeletally thin, he is now sitting up and complaining. His problem is that he longs for a jacket potato with just butter. He hates beans. But he might as well ask for gravadlax and dill. On the hospital menu, baked potatoes only come with baked beans. I asked one of the Thai ladies who deliver the food if he could possibly have a plain spud. ‘Not possible,’ she said, ‘all with beans.’ She said she would go and ask someone, but who that might be

Are David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt going about fixing the NHS in the wrong way? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, former No.10 advisor Sean Worth and director of Reform Andrew Haldenby discuss Dr J Meirion Thomas’s Spectator cover feature on the problems with the Health Secretary’s plans to reshape the NHS. Is Dr Thomas right in saying we need more focus on training GPs, and not centralised technological solutions? Will the government’s reforms be remembered in 100 years as a landmark moment for the NHS? And do we need more focus on recruiting British doctors, to improve the quality of care? Freddy Gray and the Economist’s Daniel Knowles

Jeremy Hunt’s quiet demeanour is deceptive. The Health Secretary has a bit of what my late grandfather called ‘iron in the soul’ – a measure of self-confidence, calculation and the determination not to let the bastards get you down. ‘Iron in the soul’ came in handy during the Burma campaign in the Second World War. And I imagine that it’s vital if one is to prosper as Secretary of State for Health. Hunt was sent to the Department of Health last year in order to clean up the political mess left by Andrew Lansley. Hunt’s tenure has been beset by scandals beyond his or his predecessor’s control – from Mid

News that one of the health service’s largest operators of the non-emergency 111 helpline is to pull out of the market will have raised very few eyebrows in the health sector. NHS Direct, which ran the telephone helpline that preceded 111, is on track to record a deficit of £26 million this financial year and, along with other providers, has attracted criticism for a host of operational and qualitative mishaps. NHS Direct’s unsustainability and 111’s myriad problems have been all too apparent. Like the service itself, the reasons for 111’s many failings are complex. What it does illustrate, however, is a more fundamental issue regarding the application of market principles to

One of the many problems that Andy Burnham has encountered this week is that he has had to spend more time defending his record in the last Labour government than scrutinising the current government’s changes to the health service. He has performed the first task in a rather emotional manner, and the Conservatives may well feel that politically this week has been rather successful. But now they’re going after him on the policy side of things too, perhaps to underline how preoccupied Burnham is with his own reputation. Jeremy Hunt has this afternoon written a letter to Ed Miliband, seen exclusively by Coffee House, which demands to know whether Labour

According to popular wisdom on the left — and even among some in the Conservative party — this ought to have been a tough week for the government. On Monday, the new £26,000 cap on benefits came into effect and with it a new principle: that no one on welfare should receive more than the average working family. Such a move, it was said, would expose the Conservatives to what is supposed to be their weak point: that they are the ‘nasty party’ who care about money, not people. Yet something remarkable has happened. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare cap is turning out to be not just the boldest but the most popular

Alan Johnson and Stephen Dorrell have just conducted an impressively reasoned debate on the NHS on Radio 4. This was all the more impressive given both their parties have boxed themselves into corners on NHS care scandals, from which they will continue to lash out today at the last PMQs of the summer. Whether or not Andy Burnham bears responsibility for the hospital failings detailed yesterday, his circumstances significantly constrained his ability to scrutinise the policies the government announced. Because he is in the extremely uncomfortable position of shadowing the brief he held in government, Burnham spent more time defending his own record than he did anything else. And his

There is a lot of rage in Westminster today (beyond the everyday anger exhibited by some of its inhabitants that Parliament contains other people who disagree with them) about the 13,000 deaths figure that has been bandied around ahead of the publication of the Keogh review. It’s worth noting firstly that Jeremy Hunt did not refer to this 13,000 in his statement to the Commons, but the figure made its way into the newspapers before the report’s publication.  He did say that ‘no statistics are perfect, but mortality rates suggest that since 2005, thousands more people may have died than would normally be expected at the 14 trusts reviewed by Sir

What to do about the NHS? I’ve just been on a Newsnight which took as its premise that the model is broken and needs to be fixed. “Uncaring. Cruel. Inadequate. Lax,” said Kirsty Wark, opening the show. “Why is the NHS now failing so many patients?” The Keogh report is published tomorrow and is expected to be devastating – but not detailed enough: it’ll refer to 13,000 ‘excess’ deaths across 14 hospital trusts but it will not explain why these people died. Or even who they were: those who suspect they lost a relative due to NHS blunder will be none the wiser. Towards the end of the show, Newsnight ran