Mary-Louise Harding’s scientific contributions

... 12 The U.K. equivalent of CIHR Interestingly, while the centre runs a comprehensive internal educational program, it has no real mandate to support research infrastructure beyond its walls and has been criticized for its lack of effective communication of findings to health policy makers (42). Substantial funding from the NHS facilitates the orientation of the centre's output to NHS priorities, but does leave it exposed to external budgetary constraints (86)(87)(88). ...

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A report to the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation

... At best this seems idiosyncratic; at worst it seems actively counter-productive. In response, a momentum for change has started to develop in recent months, with calls for the introduction of direct payments and/or individual budgets in areas of health care coming from a previous Health Secretary (Milburn, 2007), from a previous health policy adviser to Tony Blair (Harding, 2005;Le Grand, 2007), from the Opposition (Conservative Party, 2007) and from prominent think tanks (Alakeson, 2007;Leadbeater et al., 2008). More recently, this idea has also received support from the current UK Prime Minister (Brown, 2008) and from the Darzi Review. ...

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Individual Patient Budgets: Background and Frequently Asked Questions

... As the reconfiguration proposals progressed, national commentators focussed on the potential high number of job losses and the cost of those losses in both financial and morale terms (Carvel, 2005;Donnelly, 2005;Harding and ...

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An action research study of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in the NHS: How can PPI influence healthcare planning and decision making?

... At trust board level, contrarily, the intention is more often to make things look better than they are, and thereby to earn more income through the recently introduced payment by results (PbR) system. A survey, conducted by the NHS Alliance , of Health Commissioners reported that 67% of those commissioning under the new PbR system had concrete evidence of gaming by service providers while 53% were suspicious that gaming was happening but could not get the information from providers to investigate (Harding 2006). Carlisle (2006) provides a list of the types of game that might be played as PbR comes fully into operation. ...

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Performance measurement and metric manipulation in the public sector

... These results also reflect observations from previous research which have been put forward to explain why healthcare organisations have not been able to manage prioritisation decisions including a lack of critical capacity, capability (expertise), and time constraints [29,41,42]. Furthermore, with respect to the English NHS and in particular in light of mounting financial deficits, commentators have questioned the extent to which 'robust' commissioning is happening in PCTs [22,[36][37][38][39]. Indeed, in a recent assessment of healthcare performance conducted by the Healthcare Commission in England (the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection), 92% of PCTs scored 'fair' or 'weak' for use of resources (based on an analysis of PCT financial management, financial standing, and value for money); no PCT achieved a score of 'excellent' [40]. ...

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Managing to manage healthcare resources in the English NHS? What can health economics teach? What can health economics learn?