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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Signing up for Complaints

Just before the nation closed down for an extended period to enjoy a heady cocktail mix of secular and religious celebration, eight of the G&G (the Great and the Good) as seen from the perspective of the corner of the universe we work in, signed up to a declaration that meaningful, comparable complaints... 
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Walkin’ Back to Happiness

It was a hit for Helen Shapiro in 1961 and now it is back.  Happiness was relaunched yesterday by Action for Happiness. The show opened with the  exercise led by the Buddhist du jour  to become  fully present and then we were introduced to happiness, the organisation and the way it will work to... 
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