Summary In December 2013, NHS England directed the Health and Social Care Information Centre to establish a system for uploading and linking GP patient coded data with identifiers, using its new powers in Part 9 of the Health and Social…
Why the public should opt in to care.data and out of data privatisation
The NHS England leaflet ‘Better information means better care’, sent to every household in England, has triggered a campaign to encourage people to opt out of the new care.data system by telling their GP that they do not want their…
Don’t blame a ‘rotten NHS culture’ for the CQC cover-up
Published in The Guardian, Tuesday 25 June 2013 Market-led health reforms are leading to poor quality healthcare – and are giving managers incentives to hide failure We now know that England’s healthcare regulator, the Care Quality Commission, tried to cover…
Why we need a political campaign to reinstate the NHS
This blog first appeared on Left Foot Forward on 25 March 2013 At 2.36 on the afternoon of Tuesday 27 March, 2012 the Health and Social Care Bill 2011, repealing the legal foundations of the NHS in England, was given…
The latest casualty of health reform: casualty itself
Published in The Guardian 04 April 2013 A&E departments are the pressure valve of the health system, yet the government is moving rapidly to turn it off Accident and emergency departments are serially failing to meet targets, according to official…
Bad science concerning NHS competition is being used to support the controversial Health and Social Care Bill
Published on the LSE blog, 05 March 2012 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/03/05/bad-science-nhs-competition/ The drip feed of pro-competition studies from Zack Cooper at LSE raises serious questions for the academic community and the public about what constitutes bad science and what to do about…