health

Analysing devolved health policy in ‘interesting times’

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Ellen Stewart
Ellen Stewart

Ellen Stewart (University of Edinburgh, UK) discusses her article “A mutual NHS? The emergence of distinctive public involvement policy in a devolved Scotland“

In the last twelve months’ heated debates about the SNP’s evolving role in UK politics, there has been far too little focus on their record North of the border, where they have now been in Government for almost two full terms (first as a minority government from 2007-2011, and then, beating the odds of the electoral system, with an unexpected majority since 2011). The UK media has only occasionally engaged with this record in government, and these efforts have often been haphazard potted histories, shifting between judging Scotland’s policies or its outcomes, and between comparing them to the other countries of the UK, or to the pre-recession past.

The difficulty of discussing devolved policy in a measured fashion is not new, although it is certainly heightened in the current political climate. In 2011, when I sat down to write what was eventually published in Policy & Politics as ‘A mutual NHS: the emergence of distinctive public involvement policy in a devolved Scotland’, I was trying to pin down some substance behind the pervasive rhetoric of ‘mutuality’ in the Scottish NHS. Much academic analysis of the ‘distinctiveness’ of Scottish health policy has relied on data from interviews with politicians, civil servants Continue reading →

Huntington’s Disease: normalizing the extraordinary

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Mara Tognetti
Mara Tognetti

by Mara Tognetti, Professor of Health Policy at Milan-Bicocca University, Italy

The research project “The community takes care of Huntington’s Disease” – piloted by the Observatory and Methods for Health at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of Milan-Bicocca University and directed by the present author – has conducted free interviews to learn about how health workers and relatives find the task of assisting people with Huntington’s Disease (HD). This is an incurable neuro-degenerative genetic complaint which sets in during the prime of the individual’s life cycle and puts paid to the social and physical existence of patient and family. It places social relations under enormous strain and completely disrupts family, working and social life.

For this reason, and because no kind of therapy yet exists to retard or halt progression, the challenge is both to search for an effective cure and to find ways, from the outset, of supporting those who shoulder the burden: the patient, the family and the health workers.

The research aimed to provide a picture of family needs and difficulties in looking after an HD sufferer. We particularly looked at how caregivers perceive their own requirement for time off for themselves, on the Continue reading →

The role of formal and informal networks in supporting older people’s care during extreme weather events

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Jonathan Wistow, Lena Dominelli, Katie Oven, Christine Dunn, and Sarah Curtis, from Durham University, discuss their latest article from EPSRC-funded research, “The role of formal and informal networks in supporting older people’s care during extreme weather events”. This article is now available on fast track.

Image by West Midlands Police [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Local residents and police officers in Balsall Heath clearing snow from the pathway of an older persons home (2013). Image courtesy of West Midlands Police [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Climate change and demographic projections point, respectively, to more frequent occurrences of extreme weather and an ageing population.  Taken together these provide new dynamics to which health and social care systems need to respond.  Firstly, demographic change will lead to a growth in the population group that relies most on services within health and social care systems.  Secondly, the increased frequency of extreme weather events can have serious effects on the services, buildings, communication routes and utilities that are important for health and social care of older people.

This article is an output from an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded research project under the Adaptation and Resilience in the Context of Change programme, called Built Infrastructure for Older People in Conditions of Climate Change. The project brought together a team of researchers from different disciplines to understand how Continue reading →

A Failure of Multiculturalism? Providing Support for those who Become Infertile Following Cancer Treatment

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Karl Atkin
Karl Atkin

Karl Atkin and Sangeeta Chattoo discuss their most recent paper in Policy & Politics, Clinical encounters and culturally competent practice

A recent Guardian Roundtable in association with the British Academy identified the increasingly ethnically diverse nature of British society, while acknowledging the contested nature of multiculturalism. Such debates are now a regular occurrence as the UK struggles to accommodate what Bhiku Parekh called back in 2000 a ‘community of communities’. The prime minster, David Cameron, no supporter of multiculturalism, has criticised the passive tolerance of different cultural values, which he sees as potentially undermining the nation’s collectively agreed sense of British-ness. Nor is this an isolated view and others go as far as to attribute the failure of multiculturalism to minority ethnic Continue reading →

The translation and re-circulation of ideas about health inequalities within policy

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Katherine Smith
Katherine Smith

Katherine Smith has been awarded the Bleddyn Davies Early Career Prize for Policy & Politics in 2013. Her winning article is ‘Institutional filters: the translation and re-circulation of ideas about health inequalities within policy’.

Exposition of article

Working as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Global Public Health Unit, Dr Smith has expertise in the fields of policy construction and knowledge transfer in the field of healthcare; and this article exemplifies the salient and policy-relevant research in which she is engaged.  In this article, Dr Smith seeks to account for the varying extent which research has informed policy-making in the field of health, despite the ostensible commitment to evidence-based policy-making by successive administrations across the United Kingdom.  Continue reading →