The NHS debate

The great NHS debate.

In recent days The BMJ has been filled with commentary and debate about the future of the NHS. NHS England’s updated delivery plan calls for many changes in the way healthcare is provided and the priority attached to specific services. Without extra money, this is a zero sum game. More resources devoted to integrated care, extended hours for GPs, and improved mental health and cancer services m...

Liberating the NHS; commissioning, outsourcing and a new politics debate.

In the short months following the result of the UK 2010 General election, a new Government White Paper has been released entitled: Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS (Department of Health (DH), 2010a). It strives to distance itself from previous health-care proposals (DH, 2009), yet if the initiatives of this latest paper are combined against previous initiatives, also using high impact ...

Commissioning in English NHS. Time to debate neoliberalism.

Varsity Medical Ethics Debate 2015: should nootropic drugs be available under prescription on the NHS?

The 2015 Varsity Medical Ethics debate convened upon the motion: "This house believes nootropic drugs should be available under prescription". This annual debate between students from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, now in its seventh year, provided the starting point for arguments on the subject. The present article brings together and extends many of the arguments put forward during...

Should the NHS be privatized? Annual varsity medical debate - London, 22 January 2010

The Varsity Medical Debate, between Oxford and Cambridge Universities, brings together practitioners and the public, professors, pupils and members of the polis, to facilitate discussion about ethics and policy within healthcare. The motion on privatizing the National Health Service (NHS) was specifically chosen to reflect the growing sentiment in the UK where further discourse upon models of h...