Showing papers by "Julian Le Grand published in 2013"

Will 1 April mark the beginning of the end of England’s NHS? No

Abstract: The government’s changes to the NHS in England come into force on 1 April. David Hunter argues that they will result in creeping privatisation and destroy the public service ethos but Julian Le Grand (doi:10.1136/bmj.f1951) thinks that more competition will improve the quality of care

Framing health reform

Abstract: Nick Timmins is a phenomenon. Not only has he been the leading public policy journalist of our era, but he is a true social scientist: an objective analyst who can take the messy complexity of reality, impose order on it and draw out the appropriate generalisations – all the time writing it up in a style that entertains without dumbing down the ideas. All this he did in his magisterial volume on the history of the welfare state The Five Giants (Timmins, 2001); and he has pulled it off again with his book on the story of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, Never Again? (Timmins, 2012). Produced at incredible speed, he has provided a riveting account of the extraordinary story of this Act and its turbulent passage and has drawn out some of the important lessons. We both figure in the book and we would like to use Timmins’ account as an opportunity to reflect on two of the issues with which we were directly involved. One is extensively discussed by Timmins and concerns the alleged ‘revolutionary’ nature of the reforms. The other is not so emphasised in the book, but is nonetheless important, as well as likely to be of particular interest to readers of this Journal. It concerns evidence-based policy: the use of evidence to inform policy, the discussion of which in turn raises issues concerning the role of academic research, and of the researchers who undertake it, providing the information that may be used in highly politicised debates.