Nhs

At Prime Minister’s Questions today, backbencher Philip Lee ambushed David Cameron on the subject of health tourism. He asked: ‘As a doctor who once had to listen incredulously to a patient explain, via a translator, that she only discovered she was nine months’ pregnant on arrival at terminal 3 at Heathrow, I was pleased to hear the statement from the Secretary of State for Health today on health tourism. Does the Prime Minister agree that although the savings are modest, the principle matters? The health service should be national, not international.’ The Prime Minister replied: ‘My hon. Friend makes a very important point. This is a national health service, not

The Chairman of the Royal College of GPs recently said that ‘general practice has radically altered over the last five years, with ballooning workloads and more and more patient consultations having to be crammed into an ever-expanding working day.’ The blame for this tends to be put on a growing and ageing population or an ever-increasing range of ailments. It might also be put on the last Labour government for changing the way in which GPs work, by rewarding them for preventing, not just treating, illness. Whatever the cause, the solutions are more numerous and often ineffective. NHS Direct is for the most part staffed by poorly trained non-medics who

The health service that employs you is under more scrutiny than ever before, with shocking cases of bad care, ‘never events’ and serious lapses crawling out of the woodwork. The regulator that was supposed to keep an eye on all of this is under attack, not just for missing it, but also for apparently deciding not to publish what details it did know, and then deciding to withhold key names implicated in a ‘cover-up’. So what, in its eternal wisdom, does the trade union representing you do? The British Medical Association, which has always managed a veneer of respectability over and above many other public sector unions, today passed a

That former Care Quality Commission chief executive Cynthia Bower resigned so quickly from her current job after being named as one of the three executives involved in a discussion about covering up the Commission’s failings simply underlines what an appalling mess this case has been from start to finish. The names were withheld ostensibly because of data protection, but when they appeared, it was clear that this was about another sort of protection. Perhaps this will be the tipping point against unaccountable NHS managers and inspectors staying safe whatever their failings. Jeremy Hunt certainly seemed to think that it could be, tweeting: ‘Pleased to receive CQC letter naming the individuals involved. Clear sign

Today’s hearing of the Public Accounts Committee is going to be real box office stuff. Sir David Nicholson is giving evidence, supposedly on the NHS IT programme, but he’ll find himself confronted by Tory committee member Steve Barclay, who, armed with freedom of information evidence of 52 gagging orders in the NHS, will demand that the health service boss step down immediately. This is what Nicholson told the Health Select Committee when he gave evidence on 5 March (full transcript here): Barbara Keeley: What do you think, as chief executive of the NHS, of a loophole like that existing-where £500,000 of taxpayers’ money could be used to gag somebody who

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is correct to say that there was a ‘dramatic fall in confidence’ in alternatives to Accident & Emergency units. He says that this has built up steadily since GP contract changes in 2004. He is right of course, and who can blame him for making the obvious political point that Labour government negotiations have helped fuel this present mess? They may have caused it, but he is in power to help solve it. As a group of NHS Trusts has warned that casualty departments could collapse within six months as a result if ‘huge pressure’, any long term strategy will frankly not alleviate today’s problems. Patients

They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother’s grave have become too much. Stafford’s upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and looking for a better place. ‘People come up to me in the street and just start bawling,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go out by myself. I always need someone with me’” Bailey had been the public face of the campaign to highlight the conditions inside Stafford Hospital. She showed that nurses left food and

Health Service Journal has a great scoop this afternoon that NHS boss Sir David Nicholson will retire in March 2014. The man who was in charge of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust when the serious failings in care took place had long been considered a busted flush, but his departure seems to be set for a great deal later than those pushing for it had hoped. I’ve spoken to Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie, who has long been after Nicholson’s scalp. She says: ‘I don’t think it’s soon enough and he should go immediately. If you want to oversee a massive culture change from the bullying and stifling of whistleblowers, then you

I bet you remember your first fountain pen. Mine was a Conway Stewart with marbled barrel, I had it for starting Big School and I used to polish it. That trusty pen lasted until A-levels finally broke its back and after that I slipped down the primrose ballpoint path to slovenly writing. I never used a typewriter — too noisy, so I hand-wrote my books until the almost-silent laptop seduced me down another slithery slope. But I still hand-write when I need to take my time — books can be divided, like Americans, into fast ones and slow ones. Recently, a friend told me he had gone back to a

Labour’s new independent commission on health and social care aims to draw up plans on bringing together health services and social care so that the NHS can be financially sustainable. Launching the plans today, Ed Miliband said that ‘we must make every pound we spend go further at a time when our NHS faces the risk of being overwhelmed by a crisis in funding because of care needs by the end of this decade’. But there is one big question that Sir John Oldham, who will chair the year-long review, won’t be asking about the long-term financial viability of the health service. It’s a question that some Labourites are well-attuned