HEALTHCARE FOR ALL

The rapid pace of change and abrupt lurches in direction of England’s NHS leadership at national level are creating widespread confusion, along with the demoralisation that flows from impending job losses and yet another major top-down reorganisation. After Keir Starmer’s surprising intervention last month NHS England (NHSE) itself is set...

  “Forty Years of Failure,” by Dr. John Lister, offers a scathing critique of the NHS’s privatization experiments. Each chapter peels back layers of policy missteps and their consequences. ​ The report begins in the Thatcher era, when ideology-led policy dominated and outsourcing was sold as a panacea for public sector...

A round-up by John Lister of the financial situation in East of England Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), drawing on the latest available Integrated Care Board (ICB) papers as of March 24.   What ICBs must deliver NHS England’s ‘Operational Planning Guidance, ‘ which outlines the expectations for all of England’s...

The Spring Budget offered little additional support for the NHS or social care, as the government leaned on existing commitments around workforce, technology upgrades, and efficiency drives. What will be the impact? No New Funding to Boost NHS Capacity Sally Gainsbury, Senior Policy Analyst of the Nuffield Trust, confirmed that...

Subsidiary companies (Sub Co), spun off from the NHS, are back in favour as part of the effort to save money in the NHS. Sir Jim MacKey, NHS England’s transition CEO, told a recent meeting of health leaders that all NHS trusts should transfer support staff to wholly-owned subsidiary companies...

The scale of the government’s structural overhaul of the NHS is proving to be far greater than initially thought, with up to 30,000 jobs now at risk. With internal battles to make savings and fill capacity gaps, NHS leaders are already turning towards the management consultancy firms whose business is...

Last week’s shock announcement of the big top-down reorganisation of the NHS, with the decision to scrap NHS England (announced just three days after Health Secretary Wes Streeting called for its staffing to be halved), seems to have diverted a lot of news media from the ongoing problems at the...

Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) strapped for cash continue to see time and money disappear on lengthy procurement processes open to private companies and legal challenges. In recent weeks, two large-scale procurement processes have hit the buffers. In North West England, a group of ICBs halted the procurement of non-emergency patient...

A massive new reorganisation of the NHS has been under way since the end of last year: it took a further lurch forward and hit news headlines on March 13 with Sir Keir Starmer’s surprise announcement that NHS England is to be abolished. Throughout the process the hand of Health...

By Irwin Nash and John Lister Hundreds of non-clinical support staff are being forced out of NHS employment by East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) by a process that appeared all along to be secretive and dishonest. Back at the beginning of April last year the main...

NHS Devon is the most financially challenged ICS in England. In June 2024, the chair of the ICB (Integrated Care Board), Sarah Wollaston, resigned, saying she felt unable “to sign off on a further cut” because the “elastic had already stretched too far.” She said she was “not happy” with...

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