Better Health in Harder Times: Active Citizens and Innovation on the Frontline

For years the NHS has been the most trusted of public institutions and the envy of many around the world. But today there is turmoil. Painful shortcomings in clinical care and patient experience, together with funding cuts, threaten to dig deep into service levels and standards. Seventy years of technically advanced medicine provided free to the population has produced a widespread perception of patients as passive consumers of health care.

This book explores how we may renew for our times the collective compact that created our public services in the 1940s. Voices from service users and service providers show how this can be done. They offer testimony of what goes wrong and what can be put right when working together becomes the norm. Sections explore new ways of living and working with long-term conditions, more meaningful and effective approaches to service redesign, use of information technology, leadership, co-production and creating and accounting for quality. Accessible to a wide range of readers, with short, accessible contributions, this is a book to provoke and inspire.

Jan Walmsley is a historian of intellectual disability and Visiting Chair in History of Learning Disability at The Open University. In 1994 she founded the Social History of Learning Disability Research Group at The Open University.