BLOGS
July 11 The wait is (meant to be) over
The proposals for social care reform have been met with calls for further clarity and greater urgency today, as medical professionals and charities alike consider their impact on the sector.
The white paper has been long expected, but for many today’s announcement constitutes a significant disappointment.
July 17 Fighting old battles
Labour’s promise today to repeal the Health & Social Care Act – or ‘the Bill’ as Andy Burnham insists on calling it – criticises the Government for damaging and distracting restructuring of the NHS.
The party has also stated it will end top-down reorganisations of the health service; something that sounds eerily familiar.
Firstly, the level of trust citizens hold in politicians when it comes to the health service has plummeted.
And the proposition makes little sense – the reorganisation is already full throttle. Repealing the Act now, or in three years time once the dust has settled, is equivalent to another huge restructuring; the very thing Burnham seeks to avoid.
The time for arguing over the legislation is over and the sooner this is accepted, the sooner policy makers can begin work to improve and implement the changes as best as they can.
Simply attacking the reforms over and over is no longer enough. Labour should be concentrating on how to face the future and salvage the health service, not just regurgitating empty promises about a battle which ended months ago.
An ageing population and the need to integrate health and social care are widely acknowledged as two of the biggest challenges facing society, yet the strategy for implementing real reform is so far lacking in detail and, especially, money.
The funding problem underpins the scale of the changes recommended by the Dilnot review, and without a solution to this the wait for an effective social care system looks set to stretch out into the next parliament.
July 4 No more delays
It’s hard not to have mixed feelings when seeing the efforts put into keeping local children’s heart surgery units open by parents and local campaigners.
Som e unthinking criticism of
such
campa ign s sug ge st the people involved don’t understa n d the
issues
and just want their local unit kept open for ease of access and even local pride – but from Southampton
12 | national health executive Jul/Aug 12
to Newcastle, the fact is that those involved have a good grasp on the issues involved and can make clinically plausible cases for keeping their centres open.
Almost all of the campaigners accept the over-riding need for fewer, more specialised units: they are not ignorant as to the consequences of allowing another Bristol or Oxford.
Those scandals showed, if anything, why we can’t always just leave it up to the experts and professionals to make all the decisions,
and why
democratisation and transparency is so important. At least this incredibly long process, and the controversy around the Royal Brompton court rulings, has given the public plenty of chance to understand the issues, and no-one can deny them the right to make their views known about their local heart unit, where many have experienced fantastic quality care that is a credit to the NHS.
But the sooner this long-needed reconfiguration happens, the safer children’s heart surgery will be.
June 25 Shaky starts
Will mandatory shadowing and targeted teaching be enough
And four days of similar content to their previous training may not be the best way to achieve this. It may delay the actually beginning of their independent work but perhaps a more integrated framework of support could maintain their level of confidence as well as securing patient safety.
to significantly improve the performance of junior medics as they start work in hospitals this year? One would have hoped that five years of teaching would be enough to give them the necessary experience to fulfil their jobs without harming the patients they are there to protect. Of course putting theory into practice is always difficult and any new start inevitably means mistakes. But when the mistakes bear such a high cost, something must be put in place to combat this.
© John Chew
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