scholarly journals Brexit, the NHS and the double-edged sword of populism: Contributor to agonistic democracy or vehicle of ressentiment?

Organization ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Hensmans ◽  
Koen van Bommel

In this paper we argue that mature political democracies require an agonistic form of populism in order to function. Agonistic populism counters technocratic apathy and instrumental reductionism and provides democracies with discursive legitimacy for the expression of antagonisms. We draw on the exemplary case of Brexit to show how the long-term suppression of English populism by an all-conquering British imperial discourse, and the hegemony of technocratic solutions in Europe, transformed populism’s potentially virtuous agonistic effects into an often anachronistic, toxic and ill-directed ressentiment against the European Union. We call upon management scholars to focus on how popular ressentiment can be used as a force for good in two ways: (1) by contributing agonistically to an alternative, emotionally founded discourse about England, the European Union and a new popular civilizational project that could bind them; and (2) by inducing the creation of collective moral categories embraced across the elite/non-elite divide in the image of the post-World War II National Health Service.

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 341-344
Author(s):  
Robin G. McCreadie ◽  
Douglas J. Williamson ◽  
Lesley J. Robertson

A survey of Scottish psychiatric rehabilitation and support services, carried out in 1983 (McCreadie et al, 1985), found that although there were wide between-hospital differences, the National Health Service in Scotland was making considerable efforts to provide services for the long-term mentally ill. However, services provided by local authorities were seriously deficient.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Martin Powell

There have been recent calls for a royal commission (RC) on the British National Health Service (NHS). This article focuses on the impact of RCs and similar advisory bodies, particularly on finance recommendations, of three inquiries with broad remits across the whole of the NHS from very different periods: Guillebaud (1956); Royal Commission on the National Health Service (1979); and House of Lords Select Committee on the Long-term Sustainability of the NHS (2017). These inquiries appear to have had rather limited impacts, especially on NHS funding. First, there appears to be some hesitancy in suggesting precise figures for NHS expenditure. Second, the reports are advisory, and governments can ignore their conclusions. Third, governments have ignored their conclusions. In the 1950s and the 1980s, contrary to the recommendations of the inquiries, NHS expenditure subsequently grew only slowly, and charges were increased. In short, asking an independent RC to provide answers on NHS expenditure is perhaps the unaccountable in pursuit of the unanswerable.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-156
Author(s):  
Roberta Bivins

It is something of a cliché to speak of Britain as having been transformed by the traumas of World War II and by its aftermath. From the advent of the ‘cradle to grave’ Welfare State to the end of (formal) empire, the effects of total war were enduring. Typically, they have been explored in relation to demographic, socioeconomic, technological and geopolitical trends and events. Yet as the articles in this volume observe across a variety of examples, World War II affected individuals, groups and communities in ways both intimate and immediate. For them, its effects were directly embodied. That is, they were experienced physically and emotionally—in physical and mental wounds, in ruptured domesticities and new opportunities and in the wholesale disruption and re-formation of communities displaced by bombing and reconstruction. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Britain’s post-war National Health Service, as the state institution charged with managing the bodies and behaviour of the British people, was itself permeated by a ‘wartime spirit’ long after the cessation of international hostilities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (16) ◽  
pp. 1775-1781
Author(s):  
Sebastian Hinde ◽  
Alexander Harrison ◽  
Laura Bojke ◽  
Patrick Doherty

Background Despite its role as an effective intervention to improve the long-term health of patients with cardiovascular disease and existence of national guidelines on timeliness, many health services still fail to offer cardiac rehabilitation in a timely manner after referral. The impact of this failure on patient health and the additional burden on healthcare providers in an English setting is quantified in this article. Methods Two logistic regressions are conducted, using the British Heart Foundation National Audit of Cardiac Rehabilitation dataset, to estimate the impact of delayed cardiac rehabilitation initiation on the level of uptake and completion. The results of these regressions are applied to a decision model to estimate the long-term implications of these factors on patient health and National Health Service expenditure. Results We demonstrate that the failure of 43.6% of patients in England to start cardiac rehabilitation within the recommended timeframe results in a 15.3% reduction in uptake, and 7.4% in completion. These combine to cause an average lifetime loss of 0.08 years of life expectancy per person. Scaled up to an annual cohort this implies 10,753 patients not taking up cardiac rehabilitation due to the delay, equating to a loss of 3936 years of life expectancy. We estimate that an additional £12.3 million of National Health Service funding could be invested to alleviate the current delay. Conclusions The current delay in many patients starting cardiac rehabilitation is causing quantifiable and avoidable harm to their long-term health; policy and research must now look at both supply and demand solutions in tackling this issue.


2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niamh Power ◽  
Dawn Harwood ◽  
Akintunde Akinkunmi

Rollo May Ward, a long-term medium secure facility integrated within the West London Mental Health National Health Service (NHS) Trust, is the first dedicated long-term NHS medium secure unit to have opened in England. It caters for a group of men with complex clinical needs and risk assessment issues who had previously been inappropriately detained within high secure services owing to a lack of suitable, less secure placement facilities. We describe the background to the development of the long-term medium secure service, the referral and assessment processes, the structure of the ward and the therapeutic programmes available to patients. We also outline the characteristics of the first 21 patients to be admitted to the ward and offer advice for similar future developments.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kia-Chong Chua ◽  
Claire Henderson ◽  
Barbara Grey ◽  
Michael Holland ◽  
Nick Sevdalis

Abstract BackgroundQuality improvement (QI) in healthcare is a cultural transformation process that requires long-term commitment from the executive board, a critical theme in emerging accounts of QI success in the UK National Health Service (NHS). To help sustain long-term commitment from the executive board, an organisation-wide picture of QI applications and their impact needs to be made routinely visible.MethodWe developed a retrospective evaluation drawing inputs from the resident QI team of a healthcare organisation and academic colleagues in the field of implementation and improvement science, as well as peer-reviewed and grey literature on what constitutes success for QI in healthcare. Formative feedback on content relevance, acceptability, and feasibility issues were used to guide evaluation design. The evaluation was conducted as an online survey so that the data accrual process resembles routine reporting to help surface implementation challenges. A purposive sample of QI projects was identified to maximise contrast between projects that were or were not successful as determined by the resident QI team. To hone strategic focus in what should be reported, we also compared factors that might affect project outcomes. For understanding implementation issues, we reviewed data quality to surface challenges in the design and sustainability of routine reporting for the executive board.ResultsOut of 52 QI projects, 10 led to a change in routine practice (henceforth referred to as adoption). Details of project outcomes were limited. Project team outcomes, indicative of capacity building, were not systematically documented. Service user involvement, quality of measurement plan, fidelity and documentation of plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles had a major impact on adoption. The proximal impact of these process factors on adoption was consistently more apparent than the distal impact of input and contextual factors.ConclusionsDesigning a routine reporting framework is an iterative process involving continual dialogue with frontline staff and improvement specialists to navigate data accrual demands. A retrospective evaluation, as in this study, can yield empirical insights for dialogue about the routine visibility of QI applications and their organisation-wide impact, thereby honing the implementation science of QI in a healthcare organisation.


Federalism-E ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Eric Servais

The European Union (EU), a contested “European” political construct, is contemporarily positioned at a critical juncture that presents three options that may determine its status as a supranational actor: stagnation, dissolution, or deeper and wider integration. The myriad pressures antagonizing the European Union and its structural foundations parallel those that the project sought to address following World War II. The unprecedented level of devastation caused by advanced military technologies and totalitarian ideologies in the war provided the impetus for increased cooperation amongst independent nation-states. Institutional cooperation encourages the deconstruction of destructive socio-political forces including racism, nationalism, and primordial cultural identities. These essentialist forces emerge in the absence of effective governance and encourage internal and external hostilities. The EU is intended to provide a structural framework for liberal-democratic countries to make collective decisions to increase economic prosperity, freedom, security, and justice [...]


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Higgins

Abstract This article examines the discourses of masculinity to pervade debates on the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. The article outlines an association between excessive forms of masculinity and popular cultural discourses around conflict and war, constructing and reproducing a popular lexicon on the British experience of World War II in ways that are widely interpreted as symptomatic of a coarsening of political discussion. However, the article also emphasises the performative quality of these masculine discourses in line with the personalisation of politics, and stresses the scope for contestation and ridicule. The article thereby identifies the articulation of a performative masculinity with a nation-based politics of the right. While disputable and occasionally subject to derision, this produces a gendered component in any antagonistic turn in contemporary political culture.


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