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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Not at the heart of neurological commissioning

MAC submitted a memorandum of evidence to the Public Accounts Committee for its session on 18 January 2012 considering services for people with long term neurological conditions. Read it here.  It reflects our views on the shortcomings around neurological commissioning and integration of services for... 
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Engagement in 2012: a balancing act amidst the sound and fury

Here at MAC we always like to say that the best time to engage with people is when they can see the point of engaging, when there is something to fight for or against.   Number One in the Reasons to Engage Top Ten is “Taking It Away”.   We see this in the NHS – the mere mention that... 
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End the Rip-off Consumer Culture – Ed Miliband takes up consumer cudgels

Which? invited Ed Miliband to say his piece about consumers today to a group of us who had come in out of the early morning cold and wet – breakfast supplied – for the meeting at their Marylebone Road HQ. Ed started by reclaiming Which? for the Labour Party referring to the late Michael... 
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Rx: Urgent -get out of the Dark Ages

Future Forum 2 – not a sequel but the next round of recommendations from the great and the good that began last summer – has reported, with further insights on integrated services (along with information, by far the most important theme), education and training for the healthcare workforce, information... 
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Integration Holy Grail could be wishful thinking

Integrated services reflecting individual needs and marshalling skills and resources across the health and care sectors for the right people in the right place at the right time.  That’s what we should have now after 60+ years of a nationally funded health service.  But we don’t have it... 
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2012 – The New Year Newsletter

The author of any New Year Newsletter has two main choices, it seems to me. Look back – revisiting triumphs, disasters, moments of laughter, a time of tears. Look forward – predicting the incidents that might attract those labels. The difficulty in one of our main areas of interest –... 
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GP Federations: win-win for patients, public and frogs

The healthcare trade papers report that the RCGP and BMA (GPC) are pushing the GP Federation idea again, this time as a way to escape what they see as the problems with the commissioning reforms and the vulnerability of Clinical Commissioning Groups.  We welcome that as something that GPs can unite... 
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Hands off our Ombudsman and other Big Soc Stuff

Hands off our Ombudsman we say. The Public Administration Select Committee has taken a look at the Big Society and is not sure what it sees. The Big Society seems to have become a curiously insubstantial reincarnation of the wooly mammoth – is it real or just a ghost that haunts the cracks and... 
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Consumer Policy on Trial

I am watching Richard Thomas being put through the wringer of the Leveson enquiry via the live feed. The counsel was giving him a hard time about not going for the journalists either at all or only indirectly via approaches to the Press Complaints Commission. But it was not just Richard that was in the... 
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