Mad March MAC Newsletter

We talked in the last newsletter of laughter and lunacy prompted by a 1956 Goon show and the goings on with the new NHS legislation. Things have got little better for patient or practitioner. The latest news is that Healthwatch is being stripped of its statutory status and so the patient voice is being... 
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No, we were not invited either

MAC didn’t get an invite to the PM’s hastily convened “summit of the (maybe, sort of) willing” organisations to talk about implementing the Health and Social Care Bill.  It doesn’t sound like a very jolly time – a rather tense hour around the Cabinet Room table.  We were in good... 
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Patient centred GP care? Over my dead body, say staff

My kids are a pretty healthy bunch but after the fourteen year old had been lying groaning on her bed and refusing to eat for five days I thought I might take her to the doctor just to check that she was not dying or at risk of starving to death (there is not much to her as it is).  But then I thought... 
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Crowds of Patients Get It Right

It was in January 2006, exactly 6 years ago that I asked the question in a blog what the relevance of James Surowiecki’s ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ might be to the NHS. Now we have the data – patients generally get it right when they rate hospitals. The correlation is ‘far from... 
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The Clown in the Surgery is Crying

Do you see the same male doctor regularly? Does he work full-time in a group practice? Has he been practicing for less than 20  years? If the answer to all those questions is ‘yes’ – he may be in bad shape – a burnt-out case. A survey of GPs reported in the BMJ showed high levels... 
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Scottish NHS – SWAG-ering Success?

Staff engagement as part of an innovative approach to industrial relations  is the key to improved patient care says a Nottingham Business School report on NHS Scotland. The authors claim that “Partnership in NHS Scotland has matured into probably the most ambitious and important contemporary... 
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Local school commissioners: be our heroes, but listen first

With utter predictability, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the man with the most self-aggrandising title in education, has just had a promotion.  The  ”Founding Principal” of the politicians’  favourite school, Mossbourne Academy, and poster boy of the government’s blazers-for-all approach... 
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