Today is NHS C-Day – C for commissioning, as in CCG, CSU and commissioning boards now called NHS England. No doubt many people will have some other C-words they would use about it as well, but as the day of the biggest NHS reorganisation for many years is also Easter Monday, let’s look at something a bit less serious: which of the 211 clinical commissioning groups that have just sprung into existence have found the time to get on Twitter? Continue reading “NHS C-day: CCGs on Twitter, and other useful information”
Category: Healthcare
The CSU-zy merging, morphing map of NHS commissioning support units
Other maps of the new NHS: clinical commissioning groups (CCGs); local area teams (LATs); specialised commissioning hubs and clinical senates.
Just under a fortnight ago, the NHS Commissioning Board published an updated list of commissioning support units (CSUs) – the organisations that are about to start running ICT and other support functions for the vast majority of clinical commissioning groups.
Map removed as Google Fusion Tables no longer works.
This revealed that six of the old list of 22 had merged into three – requiring some map update work, see above* – although only one merger was highlighted in the announcement, that of West Yorkshire CSU and South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw CSU becoming West and South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw CSU under Alison Hughes. She was already acting as managing director for both, after Ming Tang, who the original MD for South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw, took the post of director of data and information management systems with the NHS Commissioning Board. Continue reading “The CSU-zy merging, morphing map of NHS commissioning support units”
ID cards and the NHS: separated soon after birth
It was only two years, one month and eight days ago that Damian Green fed the last pieces of Labour’s ID card scheme into a giant industrial shredder in Witham. The coalition, on getting into power, promised to destroy ID cards and protect the NHS. Although some think the government is putting the NHS through a metaphorical shredder with the changes that take effect on 1 April, that is overdoing it. In general, the coalition has kept its promises on these two issues.
What is not widely know is that, on its foundation in 1948, the NHS was completely tied to ID cards – you had to use a card to get treatment. Furthermore, the link survives to this day. Continue reading “ID cards and the NHS: separated soon after birth”
Is the answer to a question-marked headline always no?
No. Not always. Just quite often, like just now.
Looking at recent articles about the NHS picked up by @ImpatientNHS with question marks in their titles, there are several variants of the question-marked headline, and they don’t all mean ‘no’. Continue reading “Is the answer to a question-marked headline always no?”
CSUs: NHS commissioning support units set to spend around £670m a year
Other maps of the new NHS: clinical commissioning groups (CCGs); local area teams (LATs); specialised commissioning hubs and clinical senates.
I’ve previously written about the development of CSUs on this blog, and it’s now one of the main subjects of my first report for EHI Intelligence. Budgets and staff numbers from a sample of the 22 CSUs suggest they will set a total budget of approximately £670m for the 2013-14 financial year, and employ about 8,500 staff. It’s been covered by my colleagues on the EHI newsdesk, and there’s more details on the report here. Continue reading “CSUs: NHS commissioning support units set to spend around £670m a year”