Journalist, editor, analyst and trainer on computing, government, climate and data
The north of France is a lot like the north of England. It’s a bit colder, metropolitan types think it has funny accents and food and it has suffered from a decline in industry, particularly mining. Lille should get itself twinned with Manchester – both cities have great histories and great ambitions for the future (and both are now major student and cultural centres). Continue reading “Art galleries in northern France: La Piscine Roubaix beats Louvre Lens”
The Register covered ID cards as thoroughly as anyone over the years – partly through running stories from Guardian Government Computing (and sometimes we just tipped them off), as well as dozens of its own articles.
I’m proud to say it is serialising my book on the subject, Card declined, to mark three years since the election which brought the scheme to an end. (You can tell it’s election day today – the BBC is leading on interest-only mortgages. Election day is a great day to get attention for non-political news, given politicians are off the airwaves until 10pm.) Continue reading “Remembering ID cards on election day with The Register”
List and links to individual pages on local area teams
Other maps of the new NHS: clinical commissioning groups (CCGs); commissioning support units (CSUs); specialised commissioning hubs and clinical senates.
I’ve been looking at NHS local area teams as part of a forthcoming report for my employer EHI Intelligence, which will also cover CCGs and CSUs. LATs, the 27 local offices of the NHS Commissioning Board, are another part of the new structure of NHS that comes into force as of 1 April. Among other things, they will provide access to centrally-run ICT systems such as NHSmail.
And, this being the NHS, the local area teams map below based on a PDF from the commissioning board* features names that don’t exist on any current map of England, or at least not in the same shape. There are some names shared with CCGs and CSUs – although there are also LATs which break new ground. Continue reading “NHS Commissioning Board local area teams map: naming with LAT-itude”
The Yorkshire and the Humber region has lost more than 4% of its NHS jobs since the election, more than double the national rate, according to data published last week by the NHS Information Centre. The East of England and North West regions lost more than 3% of their NHS jobs.
With a couple of exceptions, the poorer areas of England lost more NHS jobs than average while richer regions lost fewer, between May 2010 and October 2012. Two NHS regions actually gained NHS jobs over this period: South East Coast, up 0.75%, and the North East (which has the most NHS jobs per resident of any region, with more than 24 full-time equivalent (FTE) health service staff per 1,000 residents), rising 0.53%. London and South Central reduced FTE staff numbers by less than 1%. Continue reading “Yorkshire NHS jobs cut by 4% since election, East and NW also down”
Last week, Sam Shead of ZDNet got in touch with EHI Intelligence to ask if we expect to see a paperless NHS by 2018, as Jeremy Hunt pledged in a speech (analysed sharply by my EHI colleague Lyn Whitfield – she quotes one of Hunt’s aides on whether there will be funding to go paperless as saying: “Oh God. Do you mean central money? No, not a thing”). Mr Shead quoted me as follows:
“The English NHS will not be paperless by 2018,” senior analyst at EHI Intelligence, SA Mathieson, told ZDNet. “It is made up of several hundred organisations with greatly differing IT capabilities, as well as thousands of independent GPs.” Continue reading “Local NHS news comes from local journalists, so let’s not go paperless”