We are coming up to the annual contracting round. This year it will be led by Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). Last year GPs were involved in the difficult, detailed negotiations […]
Columnists
Richard Smith: Climate change, torturers, Nero, and me
“We know what we need to do to avoid severe climate change. We know how to get it done. We have the technology, and we can afford it. But we […]
Julian Sheather: Apocalypse tomorrow
There are four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine (or pestilence) and death, and climate change will unleash all of them. I was at a BMJ conference recently that […]
David Kerr: Twitterrors – how not to communicate using social media
Medicine is an art more than a science and the canvas is communication. This week the UK supermarket giant Asda announced that it would no longer stock landline telephones as […]
David Kerr: Loose lips sink ships
Loose lips sink ships was coined as a slogan during WWII as part of the US Office of War Information’s attempt to limit the possibility of people inadvertently giving useful […]
Martin McShane: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
There are about 38,000 primary care contracts. They are worth over £12 billion. All of them are going to be the responsibility of the National Commissioning Board. By 2013 every PCT cluster […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: You are invited—and a thank you
It is hard to follow up from my last blog about the Colonel’s unexpected death on the streets of Jakarta so rather than charging into a vaguely academic or policy […]
Douglas Noble on vaccinating doctors
As I lay in Regents Park on Saturday 1 October showing my one year old daughter the falling autumnal leaves and conkers it hardly felt like winter was approaching. Not least because it […]
Tiago Villanueva: Quaternary prevention
The primary care innovation seminars group, a primary healthcare think tank that was created in Spain in 2005, convened this weekend in Barcelona. The group used to meet several times […]
Martin McShane: Why?
A frequent refrain is “we mustn’t recreate PCTs.” Increasingly, when I hear or see it said I want to ask five why’s. Let me give you an example. “We don’t […]