BSSEC » Health & social care

Gateway Family Services – new volunteering programme responds to need for work experience

October 05, 2012

This just in from Vicki Fitzgerald, chief exec at Gateway Family Services… Here is our latest Friday story – Our volunteering programme has really taken off and we are delighted with the initial outcomes. We too were cautious about volunteers taking away paid roles and being s

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Why investing in the needs of pregnant women needs to be the focus of family policy

September 14, 2012

There’s an interesting post over on the Gateway Family Services blog by Vicki Fitzgerald, Gateway’s chief exec. Vicki argues that their experience in providing pregnancy outreach services reveals numerous gaps in services and that these service failures contribute to exclu

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A new voice on the blog scene

January 31, 2012

I love the 60s retro-chic of the Chamber of Commerce — mainly because I have a soft spot for its architect, the gloriously named John Hardcastle Dalton Madin, who died earlier this month. Anyway, that’s really neither here nor there… I was at the Chamber to have brea

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NHS Monitor proposes credit ratings agencies should vet hospitals

January 20, 2012

This extraordinary story in the Guardian yesterday answered three questions that have been puzzling me. It concerns a discussion paper published by the new health watch-dog, Monitor, that clinical assessment of NHS providers should be replaced with a financial assessment by credit rat

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Care sector leaders call for overhaul of failing social care system

January 03, 2012

Further to this post, leaders from across the care sector have published an open letter in today’s Daily Telegraph calling on all political parties to work together to find a long-term solution to the funding and delivery of elderly care. The government plans a white paper on so

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EHRC report reveals elderly home care as the next frontline battle for reform and protection of rights

November 23, 2011

Anyone in the third sector involved in elderly care will doubtless already have been following the investigation that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been conducting into care for older people delivered in the home. Close to Home, the EHRC’s report, published today,

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Whatever we do, health spin-outs seem to give social enterprise a bad name

September 30, 2011

Two different — but depressingly related — stories caught my eye in SEWM’s weekly update today. The first concerns NHS Surrey’s decision to award a £500m community services contract to Assura Medical, the Virgin-owned private health company, rather than to Cent

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New funds available in grants and loans to healthcare social enterprises

August 12, 2011

As has been widely expected, new funds have come onstream to support the development and growth of healthcare social enterprises. See the coverage here in Third Sector Online. Offering grants of between £50,000 and £150,000 as well as loans, the £12m Capital Growth Fund is an extensio

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Blow-by-blow reactions to revisions to the Health & Social Care Bill

June 14, 2011

I’ve been trying to follow the blow-by-blow reactions to the changes the government has made to the Health & Social Care Bill following yesterday’s publication of the NHS Future Forum’s report. There is a full transcript of today’s speech by David Cameron s

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Circle Health Ltd — the new shape of health provision?

May 31, 2011

Thanks to Chris Newis for the pointer to this story. The BBC website recently carried a fascinating piece about social enterprise Circle’s acquisition of a ten-year contract to run Hinchingbrooke hospital, near Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire. Circle describes itself as “a s

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Anglian Community Enterprise

April 11, 2011

It seems strange to see a brand new social enterprise advertising its first job in the British Medical Journal at a starting salary of £70k, but that is the case with Anglian Community Enterprise, the new provider arm — a CIC — for North Essex PCT. Launched at the beginnin

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Struggling to keep up with the pros and cons of health ‘reforms’?

April 07, 2011

As Cameron embarks on a ‘listening exercise’ to try and quell widespread fears — both inside the health profession and outside — regarding Lansley’s health ‘reforms’, I found this piece in yesterday’s Guardian by consultant radiologist J

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Local care suppliers ‘frozen out’ by local authority culture

February 10, 2011

Local care suppliers ‘frozen out’ by local authority culture. Interesting coverage above of recent research by Manchester Metropolitan University research examining the track record of smaller co-operative providers being able to enter healthcare markets. Despite the launch of the gov

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‘Pulse’ says NHS bosses will reinvent themselves as social enterprise directors

August 27, 2010

Following the government’s recent announcement that PCTs will be abolished by 2013, I had heard from a number of people working in the health sector that key workers — including as highly placed staff as PCT chief execs — are looking at how they can reinvent themselv

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Liberating the NHS?

July 13, 2010

Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, the government’s white paper on health service reforms has been published. Download it here. I never thought I would see a government presided over by a Conservative prime minister say: It is our privilege to be custodians of the NHS, i

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Many ‘amazing’ social enterprises too small to succeed in major procurements, says NHS director of systems management

March 18, 2010

Further to this and an earlier post, Bob Ricketts, director of system management and new enterprise at DH, has stepped in to try and clear up the “misunderstanding” caused by Andy Burnham’s “NHS is the preferred provider” remarks. The story is here. Ricke

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Catching up… One of first social enterprises to receive investment from DH fund goes bust

March 18, 2010

I managed to miss this story first time round… Secure Healthcare, a social enterprise providing healthcare for prisoners went bust in September of last year. Secure had a contract worth more than £5m a year with Wandsworth prison in London but went bust with debts of over £1m, f

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Social enterprise delivery of health should never be about the dismantling of universal provision

March 12, 2010

Further to this earlier post, Third Sector Online yesterday published a story in which the Government’s spokeswoman on health in the House of Lords, Baroness Thornton, stated that despite its policy that the NHS should be the preferred provider of health services, this did not m

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‘Co-operative PCTs — the future of the NHS?’

March 11, 2010

There is interesting coverage of new social enterprise provider Central Surrey Health in The Daily Telegraph of all places. According to the DT there are a further twenty such social enterprises waiting to come forward under ‘right to request’.

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Gateway Family Services becomes first Birmingham SE to be awarded Social Enterprise Mark

November 20, 2009

At a drinks reception last night to celebrate Social Enterprise Day, Gateway Family Services (GFS) announced that it has become the first Birmingham-based winner of the Social Enterprise Mark, an independently evaluated ‘kitemark’ scheme which started in the south-west an

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