Nhs

The NHS reform debate remains fixated with money. Budgets, we are led to believe, are directly related to the quality of treatment a patient receives. But in too many areas the same spending in comparable areas is producing widely differing results. Most patients remain in the dark, thinking that if a treatment is available locally, then a national service will deliver similar outcomes. Yet the NHS' own data shows this is untrue. Take mental health. Both North Tyneside and Gateshead have similar health characteristics. They spend similar sums per head on a course of treatment -£214 in North Tyneside and £215 in Gateshead - both above the national average of £205.

They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother's grave have become too much. Stafford's upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and looking for a better place. 'People come up to me in the street and just start bawling,' she told me. 'I can’t go out by myself. I always need someone with me'” Bailey had been the public face of the campaign to highlight the conditions inside Stafford Hospital. She showed that nurses left food and drink out of patients’ reach and that those in agony screamed for pain relief that never came.

Health Service Journal has a great scoop this afternoon that NHS boss Sir David Nicholson will retire in March 2014. The man who was in charge of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust when the serious failings in care took place had long been considered a busted flush, but his departure seems to be set for a great deal later than those pushing for it had hoped. I've spoken to Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie, who has long been after Nicholson's scalp. She says: 'I don't think it's soon enough and he should go immediately. If you want to oversee a massive culture change from the bullying and stifling of whistleblowers, then you start at the top. He seriously misled the Public Accounts Committee and the Health Select Committee.

I bet you remember your first fountain pen. Mine was a Conway Stewart with marbled barrel, I had it for starting Big School and I used to polish it. That trusty pen lasted until A-levels finally broke its back and after that I slipped down the primrose ballpoint path to slovenly writing. I never used a typewriter — too noisy, so I hand-wrote my books until the almost-silent laptop seduced me down another slithery slope. But I still hand-write when I need to take my time — books can be divided, like Americans, into fast ones and slow ones. Recently, a friend told me he had gone back to a fountain pen and was finding it a joy when writing up his notes — he is not a novelist but an engineer, and appreciates good tools.

Labour's new independent commission on health and social care aims to draw up plans on bringing together health services and social care so that the NHS can be financially sustainable. Launching the plans today, Ed Miliband said that 'we must make every pound we spend go further at a time when our NHS faces the risk of being overwhelmed by a crisis in funding because of care needs by the end of this decade'. But there is one big question that Sir John Oldham, who will chair the year-long review, won't be asking about the long-term financial viability of the health service. It's a question that some Labourites are well-attuned to, and that the chair of NHS England (formerly the NHS Commissioning Board) Malcolm Grant raised earlier this month.

Within five years, we could find out how genetically predisposed we are to developing certain types of cancer. Through DNA screening, the most susceptible of us will be prompted to adapt our lifestyles accordingly and ultimately reduce the risk of developing the disease. The breakthrough has been hailed as the 'the biggest leap forward yet in understanding the genetic basis of cancer'. But at what cost? The good news is clear enough. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research and Cambridge University have identified 74 ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’ – small physical elements found on human DNA - that correlate with the probability of developing ovarian, breast and prostate cancer.

When T.S Eliot spoke of the folly of trying to ‘Devise systems so perfect, that nobody will need to be good’, he effectively described a distinction between the left – who instinctively turn to systems to get things done, and the right – who tend to believe in focusing on individuals, people, and their values. In a world where the centre-ground has become over-crowded with political parties all frantically claiming it, and a rainbow array of party hues (Blue Labour, Red Tories), this is a distinction that still makes some sense. In fewer areas is this distinction seen more clearly than how we think of our public services. Whether we think of them as the people who work in them on the front line, or the systems they work in.

Digital politics is all the rage. Take what Rachel Sylvester described in today’s Times as ‘digital Bennism’ — an online movement that is becoming increasingly influential to the Labour party’s campaign methods. And in the forthcoming Spectator, I’ve a piece discussing why policymakers are adopting internet-centric ideals to challenge the traditional way of doing things. The government’s digital ventures were discussed at Policy Exchange this afternoon. Rohan Silva — David Cameron’s senior policy advisor — said the government’s digital work is the ‘most radical thing people haven’t heard of’.

Jeremy Hunt used his address to the Conservative Spring Forum this afternoon as the next step in his quest to make the Conservatives the party of the NHS, not Labour. His speech was in some ways quite formulaic: it started with good news about health care in this country, then praise for the 'extraordinary' staff working in the NHS. But then it moved on to his duty 'to be honest about the failures' of the health service too. He said: 'If you care about something you don’t try to sweep problems under the carpet – you expose them, sort them out and make things better. And by criticising us when we do that, Labour show extraordinary complacency about the treatment suffered by some of the most vulnerable people in our society.