Dr Mike Tremblay

From the UK Guardian: private healthcare providers. The research on comparative performance of for profit and not for profit healthcare providers is well developed, so it is surprising to see such a weak quality assessment about private providers in the NHS. The NHS is a very difficult customer for a number of reasons, primarily the glass […]

Dr Tim Oliver posted on the LSE Blog a thoughtful item on the various ways to understand the negotiation structure of Brexit [link to item] He puts forward four key ones, and what I want to do is briefly comment on each. Neoclassical Realism: This is about power relationships. The UK’s position within the EU […]

NHS England and other English health organisations have produced a five year ‘forward view’ [here]. The refreshingly short and precise document establishes a new approach to the English health service, something political reform has failed to achieve since perhaps the beginning in 1948, namely the realisation that top-down reform really doesn’t work. This is a […]

Measuring Up: the health of NHS Cancer Services is a report from Cancer Research UK. I have no difficulty accepting much of what they have discovered and the report’s key points are sensible. But, two main conclusions are unsurprising and disappointing: more money and better leadership. There will never be enough money, so we need to […]

Sir Andrew Dillon, the erstwhile leader of NICE as said that it is irrational for the Cancer Drug Fund to pay for drugs that NICE has turned down. He’s right of course, it is irrational but is it wrong? The problem for Sir Andrew, and like-minded people, is that there is another logic that trumps […]

This report on the regulation of private hospitals in England from the Centre for Health and the Public Interest is important, but 15 years too late. The UK has had and continues to have a love/hate relationship with the private (or independent as it is termed) healthcare sector. This has created a significant fault line […]

I wrote an opinion piece in the Art of England (issue 77,  January 2011) on the issue of artistic plagiarism called “On Learning to Steal”. I start by musing on the usefulness of students learning art by copying works in art galleries. You know the story, littered around the floor are art students busily copying, […]

A debate started on the Arts Journal on Leadership/Followership raises a number of challenges for arts groups. In my view, the simple lead/follow dichotomy is not helpful as arts organisations are both repositories of a society’s culture (on behalf of people) and a way to placing before the public new ideas in way that engages […]

No doubt many in the arts community are concerned at rising levels of public sector austerity. For many their very existence depends on public funding of one sort or another. Few, though, will of necessity understand the underlying logic why there are public funding programmes for the arts in the first place, apart from vague […]

Art of England (issue 68, 2010) has published a short piece of mine. It is about the ‘grants welfare state’ and proposes that artists should be funded more as investments, over a few years, leading to artistic and financial success, rather than supported through project grants. I see this as a recurring theme of relevance […]

Some do indeed worship at the alter of the state. Most artists don’t make a living at their art, and most people who study art formally fail to develop their studies into a viable career. Writing in Art of England magazine recently, I observed that we should start viewing artists as entrepreneurs. Of course, what […]