Philip Booth

John Spiers

Neil Russel

This book makes the case for 'ordinary' people to get the health and social care which the state has promised them for over 60 years but which has not been delivered. What is the case for choice? How can choice be made real for the individual? What impact can genuine, individually financially-empowered choice have on effective funding, purchasing, delivery, and outcomes? How can a genuine market grow and thrive? How can the quest for choice include the large numbers of NHS and social care staff on whom success depends? The book urges individual financial empowerment, through a life-long health savings account for all NHS and social services.

Enabling Choice, Equity, Access, Improved Performance and Patient Guaranteed Care

Who Decides Who Decides?

The Invisible Hospital and the Secret Garden is a unique commentary on the first years of NHS reform, from the health insider with a patient's perspective. John Spiers has been Chairman of one of the largest NHS hospital trusts, an adviser to the Prime Minister, and is now a health policy specialist with the leading 'think tank', the Social Market Foundation. He is also known to the wider public through broadcasting and journalism. He addresses the key issues of social consent, patient power and the challenges of determining what is clinically effective. He offers discomforting, original and constructive perspectives for managing change. He argues for both policy and practice to be science-based, open, cost-effective and based on standards set in close consultation with patients. Power must be passed to the consumer wherever possible. The Invisible Hospital and the Secret Garden proposes further ways in which this can be achieved, especially by giving patients influence over how money is spent. His original concepts of 'the invisible hospital' - which patients experience but managers often do not see - and the 'secret garden' - the mystique of medicine which limits necessary change - develop the debate on fundamental cultural issues.

An Insider's Commentary on the NHS Reforms

The Invisible Hospital and the Secret Garden

This volume explores problems concerning the series, national development and the national canon in a range of countries and their international book-trade relationships. Studies focus on issues such as the fabrication of a national canon, and on the book in war-time, the evolution of Catholic literature, imperial traditions and colonial libraries.

John Spiers

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