Category: Healthcare

Recycling print vs digital and paperlessness into rightpapering

Scene one: an office in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Will Smart, the hospital trust’s director of information management and technology, considers whether the NHS should go paperless, the policy of health secretary Jeremy Hunt. His answer: “I think paper is just another device. I don’t think we will ever lose it.”

Scene two: a bar near Tower Bridge. A high-flying digital executive, freshly returned from a foreign trip advising one of his employer’s subsidiaries on optimal social media usage, is introduced to the handsome paperback version of my ID card book Card declined. “Ooh!” he says, lovingly flicking through its pages. (I don’t think Ben was just being polite.) Continue reading “Recycling print vs digital and paperlessness into rightpapering”

NHS CCG map: clinical commissioning groups on the web and on Twitter

Other maps of the new NHS: local area teams (LATs); commissioning support units (CSUs); specialised commissioning hubs and clinical senates.

Replacing one that I had set up before NHS clinical commissioning groups properly existed, Guardian Healthcare Professionals Network has put live EHI Intelligence’s new CCG map, which I have compiled. It’s also available below. Continue reading “NHS CCG map: clinical commissioning groups on the web and on Twitter”

@ImpatientNHS service notice: any suggestions for more blogs and news?

impatient-nhs-logo-2My automated Twitter feed of NHS news and comment pieces, @ImpatientNHS, now has 334 followers and has produced nearly 13,800 tweets (see here for an explanation of how it works).

On Thursday 25 July it tweeted 41 articles and posts, from obvious sources such as HSJ, the BBC and the Guardian, but also the Scottish edition of the Sun (‘NHS in death surge probe’), the Health Policy Insight blog (Alan Maynard on big pharma) and the Northern Echo (‘Support gathers for NHS rally in Darlington’). Continue reading “@ImpatientNHS service notice: any suggestions for more blogs and news?”

Salford Royal Hope building: a hospital that looks like a design hotel/art gallery

Salford Royal NHS foundation trust makes damaging fewer of its patients its priority (in other words, it aims to be safest trust in the NHS). But when visiting last week for the day job, I noted that ‘having a hospital that looks like a design hotel or art gallery’ had also been added to the to-do list.

Interviewing trust IT bosses for EHI Intelligence means visiting a lot of NHS hospitals. While special places in many ways, they tend to look functional rather than beautiful. As previously discussed, the new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham is gleaming and full of light, like a really nice shopping mall. But while I knew Salford Royal was proud of its new Hope building – which was a construction site when I last visited two years ago (it opened in autumn 2011) – I wasn’t expecting it to be cool. Continue reading “Salford Royal Hope building: a hospital that looks like a design hotel/art gallery”

How charity evaluators are changing the donations landscape

Charity evaluators are on the rise and those they choose to endorse can receive windfalls worth millions

Guardian Voluntary Sector Network has published an article by me on charity evaluators (below), organisations that examine charities on their effectiveness. I spoke to GiveWell in the US and Giving what we can in the UK, an organisation best-known for asking people to donate significant amounts of their income. Both tend to recommend small healthcare charities serving the developing world, because they offer the best value (in terms of lives saved or improved) for money. Continue reading “How charity evaluators are changing the donations landscape”