Health & Social Care

Civil servants across the Department of Health (DH) will be sent on regular work placements at hospitals, care homes and charities, in a bid to give them frontline experience of the NHS.

A nurse caring for patients in the community warns that fast-growing workloads are ratcheting up the pressure on her hard-pressed team. Winnie Agbonlahor reports.

As councils take control of public health budgets and staff, the government’s chief medical officer Sally Davies tells Matt Ross why the reforms should enable all kinds of public officials to help take the pressure off the NHS

Una O'Brien

Permanent Secretary, Department of Health

In a bid to improve the operation of the NHS, the Department of Health is publishing reams of medical performance data and anonymised patient information. Tim Fish reports on a trailblazer in the government’s open data agenda.

The Department of Health has agreed a settlement with its former commercial director, Ken Anderson, after taking him to court.

The UK has the highest rate of depression-related sickness in Europe, according to a recent survey by the European Depression Alliance. And alarmingly, over a third of the 792 managers surveyed said they have no formal support in place to help them deal with depressed employees. We have a very long way to go before we can say we’re properly supporting employers and employees in recognising and managing depression in the workplace. And this is certainly true within the civil service.

A veteran voluntary sector worker for a Midlands health charity speaks out

An NHS hospital employee says that reforms are creating a culture of fear about jobs, affecting morale and increasing stress-related illnesses among staff

Health department permanent secretary Una O’Brien has written to other permanent secretaries asking them to sign up to public health campaigns designed to improve the health of their staff.

A paediatric epilepsy nurse reveals her worries about job cuts and the power of managers over clinicians.

Eleven NHS foundation trusts are in financial difficulty, and a further 13 are at risk of getting into difficulty, David Bennett, the chief executive of the NHS regulator Monitor, told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday.

The Department of Health’s new information strategy sets out plans to standardise data collection in NHS bodies, and to share and use it more effectively. Colin Marrs examines a trailblazer for the open data agenda

CBI director-general John Cridland writes (CSW p4, 12 April 2012) that the government has made little progress with its public service reforms over the past nine months. Those working in health and education witnessing major changes being pushed through might beg to differ, as might the civil servants trying to make sense of proposals from ministers for the ‘right to challenge’, ‘right to provide’ and now the ‘right to choose’.

Civil servants in the Department of Health (DH) have raised concerns over its approach to policymaking, its risk-assessment skills and its effectiveness at consulting stakeholders, an exclusive opinion poll for CSW has found.

The legal clock is ticking for the government, as ministers must decide next week whether to release the NHS transition risk register or appeal again against the Information Tribunal’s decision that it should be published.

The last chair of the UK Statistics Authority was a fierce defender of the impartial and objective use of statistics. His replacement, Andrew Dilnot, tells Joshua Chambers how he intends to operate in this sensitive and important role.

A care manager says cuts can drive useful change – but uncertainty prevents it

The NHS could host commercial advertising on its website in the near future, a deputy director at the Department of Health said on Monday at a seminar held by CSW in conjunction with the Post Office.

Different targets and better joint working between health and social care agencies would improve the ambulance service, says this week’s Frontliner

After nearly 22 months, the Commons select committees’ first elected chairs have had plenty of time to size up their Whitehall counterparts. Joshua Chambers asked them how the departments they watch have been performing

Departmental select committee chairs have provided mixed reviews of the departments they scrutinise for a Civil Service World Special Report, which has found that 40 per cent of them are dissatisfied with departments’ responses to their reports.