Irish Political News

I'll be doing some fairly major maintenance on the site this morning, so I apologis in advance for any inconvenience.

I'll try to keep you informed, but it may be unpredictable.

Matt

I probably missed this, but I can't find a reference.

Why does Nick Robinson's Newslog never have any comments in the first half of the month?

This applies to April, May, June and July this year.

Nick's posts in the second half of each month get hundreds of comments, but none at all in the first half of the month.

What is going on?

This is Simon Sarmiento’s fifth and final Guest Column on the Wardman Wire, while David Keen is on holiday from the blog. This week Simon examines a critical appreciation of the National Health Service.

This is my last guest column for the month of August. I want first to draw attention to a recent critique of the National Health Service, which a member of my family who works in the NHS pointed me to recently.

The author is a distinguished American health expert, Professor Donald M. Berwick of Harvard. He's a pediatrician but also Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. And he is also President and CEO of a not-for-profit organization called the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. It was in this capacity that he spoke in July to a big gathering of NHS staff at Wembley called NHS Live. You can watch his speech, as actually delivered. You can read what looks like the prepared text here, and an edited version was published in the British Medical Journal.

He had some very positive things to say about our Health Service, and he also had some very sound advice for its improvement. We in Britain tend to complain a lot about NHS shortcomings; this should give us a better perspective on how fortunate we are.