Blogs

C Difficile and Complexity

Yesterday the Healthcare Commission, the major inspectorate of the NHS came out with a report on the C difficile epidemic at Stoke Madeville Hospital. The report castigates the management of the hospital for focusing only on meeting government targets and losing sight of its responsibilities for infection control.

The Chief Executive of the period was fired and a new acting Chief Executive has responded to the Commission report by agreeing with its conclusions and promising to collaborate with the commission to make sure that such breaches no longer occur.

What is interesting to me is that the commission actually does recognise that the centre has put extreme pressure on individual organizations to meet government targets and that this resulted in reducing the priority given to infection control.

Entrenched Health Care Practices and Complex Systems

Paper published in Australian Health Review, Vol. 30 (1), February 2006, page 7.

I have been asked to write about entrenched health care practices and why they make change so difficult in the health field. In this paper I would like to explore several aspects of this issue in Canada, the UK and Australia; examine some of its origins, look at how it manifests itself today and what might be done about it. I have written this short paper with others in the Clinamen Collaborative who will share the authorship with me.