Innovation

With the showers has come a certain malaise tinged with queasy uncertainty.

This could be a post-Bill slump in the NHS, a response to the long grind of making cuts with no end in sight, and the sheer weight of detail to be worked through with respect to the mass reorganisation outlined in the now Health and Social Care Act.

The queasiness extends beyond health, look at local Government for example facing an average six per cent cuts rather than a ‘flat real’ settlement as in health.

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High stakes with the Health and Social Care Bill last week. But at our Health Policy Summit 2012 we pushed aside for a minute big reform, structures, and long run consensus-dividers such as competition/choice, public/private, and command versus autonomy.

Instead, we majored on – as guest Don Berwick so thoughtfully put it – ‘contextually adaptive changes’.

A physician who was formerly chief of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Don was upbeat that with the right changes...

Annual per capita growth rates in acute care costs are increasing fastest for older adults.

Given that this growth rate is expected to continually increase, it is imperative that we increasingly focus our efforts around developing new cost-conscious models that are also able to meet the complex needs of older patients.

The biggest problem is that our current hospital care model was developed years ago when most adults tended to not live past 65 or were living with chronic illnesses and usually only had one active problem that brought them to hospital.

While things still...

Data from countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows a roughly inverse correlation between spending on health (as a share of GDP) and mortality, and a roughly inverse correlation between growth in spending on health and improvements in mortality (the correlations hold even if the US is excluded).

These glaring facts are likely to force ever more attention on health productivity, health innovation and the adoption of models from elsewhere that can demonstrably...

The Nuffield Trust’s fourth Health Policy Summit opens on Wednesday, bringing together senior health leaders, clinicians, policy-makers and academics. The timing is not auspicious.

The intense political wrangling over the Health and Social Care Bill has spilled out beyond Westminster and is dividing professionals in the NHS. Even at this late stage the Bill’s passage through Parliament is uncertain.

Whatever you might think of the Government’s proposals, the financial challenge that predated them is now a reality for the NHS. It is also rapidly becoming...

Last year the Archbishop of Canterbury attacked what he described as "the quiet resurgence of the seductive language of the deserving and undeserving poor".

The pressure to make huge savings within the NHS, coupled with the commissioning agenda and the introduction of private competition to that process could see the deserving and undeserving poor joined by the deserving and undeserving sick. This can't be right. After all, no one chooses to be sick.

When I hear insulting terms like "frequent flyers" being used to describe people who are sick and need...

I have been in Boston for a few months now, and the weather has turned.  We were robbed of a spectacular New England Fall. Some blamed the hurricane; some the earthquake; the more scientific amongst us, the temperature.

Fall was delayed as the chlorophyll rich leaves persisted due to the stimulation of an atypically warm and sunny October/November. After weeks of patiently waiting for the leaves to change colour, they changed abruptly and fell almost without anyone noticing.

Around the same time, Don Berwick was quietly making ready his notes for his successor as he was...

‘Integration, integration, integration’ may not yet be on Channel 4 at 8pm on a Wednesday night but it is right up there on the agenda of the NHS.  It’s a central theme of the Health and Social Care Bill; it’s one of the key areas for the Future Forum’s second listening exercise; and perhaps, to quote Chris Ham, “it’s an idea whose time has come.”

Our involvement with the Nuffield Trust, participation in the listening exercise and in the newly convened ‘Integrated Care Discovery Community’ here in the northwest, has given us...

The Nuffield Trust recently joined forces with Salzburg Global Seminar and the British Medical Journal to host a global meeting on health system reform. Housed in the magnificent surroundings of Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg Global Seminar has been a refuge for thinking and reflection since the Second World War. On this occasion, emerging leaders from 29 countries spanning every stage of economic development, met to discuss the challenges of achieving universal access to high quality health care that is both affordable...