One step forward, two steps back--not the Tango: comment on Gallotti and Frith.

It Takes Two to Tango: Customization and Standardization as Colluding Logics in Healthcare; Comment on “(Re) Making the Procrustean Bed Standardization and Customization as Competing Logics in Healthcare”

The healthcare context is characterized with new developments, technologies, ideas and expectations that are continually reshaping the frontline of care delivery. Mannion and Exworthy identify two key factors driving this complexity, ‘standardization’ and ‘customization,’ and their apparent resulting paradox to be negotiated by healthcare professionals, managers and policy makers. However, whil...

Ownership in Name, But not Necessarily in Action; Comment on “It’s About the Idea Hitting the Bull’s Eye”: How Aid Effectiveness Can Catalyse the Scale-up of Health Innovations”

A recently-published paper by Wickremasinghe et al assesses the scalability of pilot projects in three countries using the aid effectiveness agenda as an analytical framework. The authors report uneven progress and recommend applying aid effectiveness principles to improve the scalability of projects. This commentary focuses on one key principle of aid effectiveness – country ownership; it desc...

Evaluating the Evaluator: Towards understanding Feed-back, Feed-up, and Feed-forward of Moroccan Doctorate Supervisors’ Reports

Supervisor’s feedback is both a naysaying and a puzzling concern that has always tormented academics in higher education. Particularly, written feedback on pre-final or final versions of a submitted doctoral dissertation is indisputably the most significant step toward granting a doctoral student supervisee the right to defend his/her research project. It also constitutes a rich source on how s...

The Changing National Health Service: Market-Based Reform and Morality; Comment on “Morality and Markets in the NHS”

This commentary explores some of the issues raised by Gilbert et al.short communication, Morality and Markets in the NHS. The increasing role of market mechanisms and the changing types of healthcare providers together with the use of choice and competition to drive improvements in quality in the National Health Service (NHS), all have important ethical implications. In order for the NHS to con...

Managing ethnic diversity in Georgia: one step forward, two steps back