Social care minister Liam Byrne has taken the first step towards giving elderly and disabled people budgets to buy their own care services, with the launch of 13 pilot schemes this week.
Voluntary sector bodies are not just talking about public service provision. They're successfully delivering it. So why is the government so slow to back up the Third Sector with long-term contracts...
A Yorkshire-based NHS trust repeatedly ignored Audit Commission warnings not to inflate its asset values in order to hide deficits totalling £4.5m, it emerged this week.
Reorganised primary care trusts will go through a 'fitness for purpose' test similar to the assessment of foundation trust applicants, NHS chief executive Sir Nigel Crisp said last week.
Ministers and health service managers admitted this week that action is needed to address poor standards of NHS stroke care, after government auditors said the service was failing patients.
More than 100 investigations into standards at five new private sector treatment centre providers were triggered between April 2004 and June 2005, a report for the Department of Health revealed this...
The former Inland Revenue replaced the Department for Work and Pensions as Whitehall's most sickly organisation last year with staff taking an average of 12 days off ill.
The vast majority of NHS staff do not know who is responsible for eliminating hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA from their hospital, the results of a national survey have suggested.
Rhodri Morgan is every bit as evangelical as Tony Blair when it comes to improving public services. But Wales is taking a very different route from Westminster. Steve Davies reports on public sector...
A new hospital assessment tool, launched by the Department of Health this week, will be the catalyst for 'radical change' and possible service cuts, Public Finance has been told.
Health workers will be sent to deprived communities to provide health tests as part of a ten-year plan for the future of the NHS in Scotland announced by Health Minister Andy Kerr.
Most health service chief executives believe patients should be able to register with more than one GP, according to a survey carried out by the NHS Confederation.
No single measure of public sector productivity will ever capture the complex relationship between investment in services and the results achieved, the Office for National Statistics has admitted.
Partnerships between public sector organisations risk wasting money unless there is a clear sense of what they are hoping to achieve and who is in charge, the Audit Commission warned this week.
Sixty-six MPs have signed a parliamentary motion urging Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to extend last week's surprise deal on unfunded public sector pensions to local government.
Health professionals fear that primary care trusts will still lose their function as providers, despite Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt's apparent concession on the issue this week.
Ofsted, the education watchdog, was this week accused of a puritanical attitude towards its staff after it emerged that managers could cut costs by docking employees' pay if they take emergency leave...
Most of the Revenue & Customs department's 100,000 staff are to receive pay rises of 3%-4% each year until 2008 under a new deal that will eradicate large wage disparities.
