This is a commentary on the article ‘The rise of post-truth populism in pluralist liberal democracies: challenges for health policy.’ It critically examines two of its key concepts: populism and ‘post truth.’ This commentary argues that there are different types of populism, with unclear links to impacts, and that in some ways, ‘post-truth’ has resonances with arguments advanced in the period a...

1. UK National External Quality Assessment Service 2 Department of Haematology, University Hospitals of Leicester 3. NHS Blood and Transplant & University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust 4. Institute of Biomedical Scientists and NHS Blood and Transplant 5. University Hospitals of Leicester 6. International Blood Group Reference Laboratory, NHS Blood and Transplant. 7. Barts Health NHS Tr...

This commentary on the Editorial ‘The politics and analytics of health policy’ by Professor Calum Paton focuses on two issues. First, it points to the unclear links between ideas, ideology, values, and discourse and policy, and warns that discourse is often a poor guide to enacted policy. Second, it suggests that realism, particularly ‘programme theory’ are useful tools for health policy analys...

Following the Public Enquiry into avoidable deaths and poor standards of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, the English National Health Service (NHS) is aiming to become a system devoted to continual learning and improvement of patient care. The paper aims to explore current perceptions of healthcare staff towards reporting and organisational learning for improving patient safety. ...

OBJECTIVES To explore the success of the introduction of the National Health Service (NHS) 111 urgent care service and describe service activity in the period 2014-2016. DESIGN Comparative mixed method case study of five NHS 111 service providers and analysis of national level routine data on activity and service use. SETTINGS AND DATA Our primary research involved five NHS 111 sites in Eng...

BACKGROUND There is consensus about the importance of 'recovery' in mental health services, but the link between recovery orientation of mental health teams and personal recovery of individuals has been underresearched. AIMS To investigate differences in team leader, clinician and service user perspectives of recovery orientation of community adult mental health teams in England. METHOD In ...

AIM To understand the effects of Nurse Case Managers (NCMs) working in primary care in the English National Health Service (NHS) from multiple perspectives and how this new role impacts on social workers, this paper reports and discusses findings from a multi-level study of the role of NCMs working in primary care in the English NHS. BACKGROUND Case management as understood by the NHS is equi...

The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has proposed changes to the English National Health Service (NHS) that will extend the hospital market introduced by “New Labour” in the 2000s. 2 This was the second era of hospital competition within the NHS; the first, the “internal market,” applied throughout the UK from 1991 to 1997. Studies of the NHS markets have generally used one of two paradigms, e...

We review a series of case studies from English health authorities that have tackled the assessment and improvement of health outcomes. We reflect their concerns and difficulties and the lessons they learnt. We identified case studies from a telephone survey of 91 representatives of the 100 English health authorities (61 were directors of public health). We edited 26 structured case studies whi...