I read a post on LinkedIn recently, and I cannot remember who wrote it, saying the UK is structurally stupid, reactive by nature, especially with how we handled the heatwave. Ouch, I thought, and kept scrolling. And yesterday, a ShiftWorks King’s Fund piece on collective stupidity landed in my inbox, making essentially the same accusation…
Neighbourhood health has become the organising idea behind much of NHS reform, and with that comes an interesting possibility worth looking at: that a handful of recurring patterns can be found underneath very different neighbourhood partnerships, regardless of the place, the people involved, or the specific problem in front of them. Boards commission pilots, workforce…
This morning, with more to muse on than usual, I made the mistake of asking my daughter for editorial direction. There was a heatwave forcing half the country into a national debate about whether shorts are acceptable office wear, and a churn of Prime Ministers that will eventually work its way into the NHS, into…
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…