A forum on healthcare policy and professional issues, by Glasgow-based GP and FT Weekend columnist Margaret McCartney
From the category archives:
The idea that the UK is a bad place to get treated as cancer seems to have been accepted as truth by certain sections of the media. It just isn’t : I’ve been trying to say so for a while with no success whatsoever. Anyway this editorial in the BMJ looks at the reliablity of [...]
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I’m not quite sure what I think of the King’s Fund: some of their papers seem to me to miss the point: academic distance from reality can be damaging.
They have examined Referral Management Centres and concluded that they aren’t very good, which was obvious to GPs but lost on politicians. Quite interesting.
What I find more [...]
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I think not. I’ve spent a bit of time reading the new White Paper and associated fluff, I conclude that there are possibly two good things in it. I’ll get to them.
But, oh, the jargon! And the rest of it! What on earth does ‘equity and excellence: liberating the NHS’ actually mean? I’m really tired, [...]
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So how exactly do we know that there are – as the Health Protection Agency says -around 55,000 new cases of H1N1 “swine” flu each week – especially now that we are no longer swabbing patients before prescribing for it?
Extrapolation. The HPA does give a range, between 30,000 and 85,000 cases. There are about 100 [...]
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A rather disappointing debate recorded in Hansard on the subject of screening for cancer in men.
Unfortunately the extremely important issues of effectiveness, evidence, and potential harms seem to have become lost, e.g. “the government is committed to introducing screening for prostate cancer” – but since the evidence is mixed but much of it shows that it does more harm than good [...]
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An interesting survey has been published by the Foundation for Mental Health. It’s called “Death of the smoking den, The initial impact of no smoking legislation in psychiatric units in England in 2008.”
In the introduction to the report, Louis Appleby, the National Director for Mental Health is quoted as having said in 2007 “The rest of [...]
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If you have read the book Plundering the Public Sector (David Craig and Richard Brooks) or NHS plc (Allyson Pollock), then the concerns over the costs to the NHS of management consultants will not be news.
A report echoing this was released by the House of Commons Health Committee at the end of last week (and [...]
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Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs) were part of this governments plans for the NHS. GPs were encouraged to use them: this was meant to be the epitome of ”patient choice”. But not only have many contracts been issued on a “take or pay” basis, the cost efficiencies of these units have not been hauled up for scrutiny. Professor [...]
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Margaret Haywood was struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council last week. She had secretly filmed patients in the hospital where she worked to document the conditions, which she claimed to have previously reported. These images were subsequently broadcast on the BBC programme Panorama. There has been an outcry from nurses, as well as from some families [...]
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And lo, the government said, we must woo voters. And they had a great idea: check ups. Let’s not leave them to the private providers. Let’s put them on the NHS. Everybody loves a check up.
The Department of Health sets out its new idea in a policy paper “Putting prevention first – vascular checks: risk [...]
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