Lansley outlines Tory NHS plans
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley has pledged to cut the cost of NHS bureaucracy by a third at the Conservative Party conference. Lansley gave few details of where his £1.5 billion of savings would come from, although he attacked commissioning bodies, NHS quangos and “political” targets as examples of Labour profligacy. He claimed that switching […]
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Twitter ‘weloveNHS’ campaign grows
Thousands of people have joined the ‘welovetheNHS’ campaign on Twitter to show their backing for England’s National Health Service. The campaign was launched to defend the service after US Republicans labeled it “evil” and “Orwellian” in a bid to discredit Barack Obama’s planned healthcare reforms, which could include a Federal government insurance scheme. Tens of […]
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Conservatives to ‘dismantle’ NPfIT
The Conservatives have promised to “dismantle Labour’s central NHS IT infrastructure” and instead move to a choice of local accredited patient record and clinical systems.
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Lord Darzi quits government
Lord Darzi is to resign as a health minister but to retain a role as a government advisor. Downing Street said he wanted to give up his ministerial duties to spend more time "on his clinical role and academic research". Lord Darzi was one of a number of non-politicians brought into government by Gordon Brown […]
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Interim flu line for 100,000 cases a day
The Department of Health’s interim flu line service is expected to be operational by next week, as the government predicts 100,000 swine flu cases a day by the end of August. The interim arrangements for the flu line, which has had its name changed to the National Pandemic Flu Service, have been put in place […]
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Money, money, money
The theme of this year’s NHS Confederation conference was money; or rather the coming lack of it. Lyn Whitfield reports.
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Confed: future ‘unprecedentedly difficult’
The NHS Confederation has warned that the health service is facing a £15 billion shortfall from 2010-11 and changed ways of working will be needed to cope.
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LAS system crashes again
The London Ambulance Service computer system crashed for nearly two hours on one of the busiest nights of the year so far. The crash hit the LAS on Saturday night, when a fault occurred in the computer-aided dispatch system. This feeds emergency calls into a computer and automatically alerts the nearest ambulance. As technicians worked […]
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Opposition calls for rethink on data storage
The debate over healthcare data security took a political turn as the opposition called on the government to change its plans for central data storage.
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CfH underspent by £828m over three years
Delays in implementations and delivery of systems under the National Programme for IT over the last three years means that Connecting for Health has underspent by £828m on its original capital and revenue budgets, health minister Ben Bradshaw has revealed. The majority of the underspend occurred in the last financial year, when CfH spent just […]
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