Neighbourhood health is fundamentally a “mess,” a situation requiring ongoing management rather than a discrete problem to be solved. And because forty-three different places face genuinely different conditions, you need forty-three different responses, not one template imposed everywhere. The Macmillan Trailblazer programme directly mirrors the principle of complementarism: its flexible lead applicant structure lets different…
Part 2: Nature Does Not Have a Filing System In my last piece here, I asked what a health system designed for constant iteration would look like. This week I want to go one level deeper, because I think the answer starts with a question we rarely ask: are we even looking at the right…
Two things happened recently that made me stop and think. The government announced plans to absorb the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch, HSSIB, into the Care Quality Commission. HSSIB exists to investigate serious patient safety incidents without blame, so that the NHS can learn from them. The CQC exists to regulate and inspect NHS services. The…
Part 1 The NHS is, once again, reorganising itself. Wes Streeting’s departure in May after nearly two years as Health Secretary leaves behind the largest restructure in over a decade: NHSE abolished, functions folded back into the Department of Health and Social Care, integrated care boards merging and downsizing, a 10-year plan promising neighbourhood health…
The local election results in the UK arrived like a puzzle with pieces that did not quite fit together. Reform UK gained over a thousand council seats, the Green party added hundreds of seats, Labour lost ground everywhere (Sorry, KS), Conservatives retreated further still (Poor Tories!). But the most curious finding sat in the detail….