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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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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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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Decommissioning lessons: accept the anger – and the impact

If you are sitting comfortably, then we’ll begin with the lesson on “decommissioning for GPs”.  When resources are finite –shrinking in real terms given NHS inflation – commissioning to achieve quality, innovation, productivity and prevention (QIPP) can only happen in parallel with decommissioning... 
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Top Site, Top Dogs, Top of the Agenda? Everyone’s a winner.

Like most local community groups, the Clissold Park User Group (CPUG) often struggles to get people to understand its role.  As the current Chair of the group I can see that the higher our profile and the more professional we look, the less people think we are really a community group.  If you... 
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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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Corrupting Caroline

On Friday I shelled out £50 to a local student for looking after my daughters so I could spend the day sitting in a room full of health professionals, local authority workers and people from the salaried bit of the voluntary sector who, if not all highly paid, were certainly being paid quite a bit to... 
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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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J’accuse! updated – a modern approach to accountability

Accountability is meaningless when the finger of suspicion and blame can move in a week from a single “rogue” reporter to the Chairman of News Corporation. In a situation where potentially all are held accountable in this random way, no one is accountable. Caroline Oliver a friend of MAC... 
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