Having read the general election manifestos so you don’t have to, I have written the following piece for Guardian Healthcare Professionals Network. There is an area of significant difference between the parties on the NHS, and – perhaps not a massive surprise – it’s the role of the private sector.
If you do want to read the general election manifestos, which I find is often the best way to get an overview of what each party wants to do, you can do so through the following links, to PDF copies in each case: Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, UK Independence Party, Green Party, Plaid Cymru and National Health Action Party.
Continue reading “Election 2015: what do party pledges mean for NHS staff?”
, a detailed study of government idiocy by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They describe the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), which failed to provide EPRs to most of England’s trusts, as “the veritable RMS Titanic of IT disasters” and “doomed-from-the-beginning”. As they point out, it was started at a meeting “between a prime minister [Tony Blair] who knew next to nothing about computers and a clutch of computer enthusiasts”; it was “wildly overambitious”, “far from being essential” and was apparently never subjected to “a serious – or even a back-of-the-envelope – cost-benefit analysis”.