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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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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Citizen as e-data owners – the power to transform the citizen/state relationship

“All hospitals used social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube” Can this be true? Well not in the UK. The figures come from research done by the US-based Society for Participatory Medicine. They took a look at 14 top-ranked US hospitals and the variety of uses is an instructive... 
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Pulling strings at the NCB

While their Lordships sweated over amendments to the the bells and whistles juggernaut that is the Health and Social Care Bill, in another part of the Westminster Village, Chair-designate at the National Commissioning Board (NCB), Prof Malcolm Grant, told the Health Select Committee’s pre appointment... 
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Think Fig – the MAC Autumn Newsletter

There were times in the summer when we worried that Andrew Craig would go pop. Such was his despair as he watched our hopes and expectations for meaningful public engagement – beware! new acronym EwPC  (engagement with Patients/Communities)- go down the drain. We were concerned that his powerful... 
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Request for Geek Bearing Gifts

Raw Data – Tough to Chew This is what happens when geeks start to play with data and map the blogosphere. This is just showing links and connections as well as indicating apparently how much certain topic areas are addressed. I found this on a website run by a Malcolm Hurst who works for MSN and... 
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Ombudsman Direct – the preferred citizen solution

Should people be able to take their complaints direct to the Parliamentary Ombudsman without bothering with their MP? That is the question in a new consultation from Ann Abraham’s office. Our view? ‘If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Get out of the way’.... 
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Raw Data Now! What do we want? Raw Data Now!

Partner Craig sent us an email recently where he professed himself baffled on how information on GP performance in Wandsworth got published: Strange. Somehow this got published even though it was never officially launched and was still being worked on when I was last involved with it in April this year.... 
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Controlling the NHS – a new prescription for A. Lansley

We think we have found a solution that will bring the NHS under control. Nature magazine has picked up some work done by people at MIT and Northeastern University which shows how to control complex networks. Their computer model can take a look at complex networks and reveal which are the critical points... 
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