Hands off our Ombudsman and other Big Soc Stuff
December 15, 2011 by Colin Adamson
Filed under Consultation, Local Involvement Network, News posts, Ombudsman, Organisational Innovation, patient participation, Public Involvement
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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Involvement sell-out gathers pace
November 29, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Consultation, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, patient participation, Public Involvement, QIPP
Most patients will give a big yawn to the 2012-13 NHS Operating Framework for England. Unwise. Buried in an appendix is the game plan for completing the sell-out of genuine patient and public involvement. This started in the summer with the launch from NHS CEO David Nicholson of the innocuously named...
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The biggest something-or-other in the world
September 23, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Local Involvement Network, News posts, Public Involvement, Social Care, social enterprise
Remember the Government’s rather breathless aspiration back in the summer of 2010 to turn the NHS into the biggest social enterprise sector in the world? If you work for Central Surrey Healthcare - the social enterprise owned and run by 770 entrepreneurial community nurses, therapists and...
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Authorisation about us, but without us
August 21, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, Public Involvement, Wandsworth
Small may be beautiful, but “size matters”. That’s is the inescapable conclusion of the news that 1 in 7 CCGs (clinical commissioning groups, formerly known as GP consortia) are too small for authorisation. Health Service Journal reckons that 47 CCGs have fewer than 50,000 patients; some...
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The throttling season
August 14, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Local Authorities, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, patient participation, Public Involvement
The dog days of August have been anything but torpid, and not just on the streets. In the policy arena the Department of Health continued to tighten its grip around the throat of any meaningful patient and public involvement. It’s the throttling season. The most recent example was the launch...
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Raw Data Now! What do we want? Raw Data Now!
July 7, 2011 by Colin Adamson
Filed under Active citizens, Local Involvement Network, News posts, Organisational Innovation, patient participation, Public Involvement, Research
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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Whose consortium is it anyway? – our take on lay involvement in authorisation
May 30, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under Active citizens, commissioning, Local Authorities, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, Public Involvement
How can local lay people be engaged with the authorisation process for commissioning consortia? The Bill is silent on this point (which speaks volumes in itself), so we thought we’d fly a kite for our thoughts on how the National Commissioning Board (NCB) authorisation process with consortia...
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Just saying “no” won’t do
May 27, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Consultation, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, Public Involvement, Wandsworth
Yesterday about 85 people from around Wandsworth gathered with our pathfinder consortium leaders to discuss what good commissioning and meaningful patient and public participation could and should look like locally. There is no doubt local people are keen to be involved from the outset in the changes...
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LINks to Health Watch – hey presto?
May 21, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Complaint Handling, Dispute Resolution, Local Authorities, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, Public Involvement
Does it matter that England’s Local Involvement Networks (LINks) are in a transition period lasting at least twelve months to turn themselves into shiny, new organisations called Local Health Watch? Assuming we can avoid a re-run of discontinuity, demoralisation and loss of organisational memory...
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Patients as customers Prof Field?
May 17, 2011 by Andrew Craig
Filed under commissioning, Consultation, Foundation Trusts, Local Involvement Network, News posts, NHS, patient participation, Public Involvement
Just spent a frustrating couple of hours watching a live Q&A session on the NHS reforms and possible changes to the Health and Social Care Bill with Prof Steve Field (who started off by being an hour late arriving at the Guardian office venue). How depressing to hear him more or less dismiss patient...
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