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The planning and commissioning of nurse education by consortia of NHS trusts and others in England is examined. These arrangements are analysed in terms of quasi-market theory, investigating their ability to co-ordinate effectively the demand for nurse education and workforce demand for nurses. Hence the paper examines evidence concerning the success or failure of consortia to co-ordinate these aspects, discussing the arguments over nurse and student nurse shortages, and the procedure for assessing the demand for nurse training places. The paper argues that current nurse shortages illustrate past planning errors in commissioning nurse training. Consequently, the central body (National Health Service Executive) is still aiding consortia in their decision-making concerning numbers of nurse training places, modelling workforce plans and suggesting increases in training places (and producing the money to pay for this). As such, it is argued, the quasi-market is not as yet a completely devolved one. It is suggested in the concluding discussion that if qualitative benefits of consortia fail to materialize (as suggested elsewhere), and the quantitative functions are inadequate, the utility of consortia as planners and commissioners of nurse education may be questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the increasing international salience of homelessness can be partially explained by reference to the revanchist thesis (involving processes of coerced exclusion and abjection), but the situation on the ground is more complex. It reports on interviews with 18 representatives of 11 homelessness service providers in one city in England. As Cloke et al. found, these providers tended to be either larger, more 'professional', 'insider' services or smaller, more 'amateur', 'outsider' services. However, this does not mean that the former were necessarily more revanchist and the latter less so. Rather, the actions of both types of organisation could, in some cases, be construed as both advancing and counteracting a revanchist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose — Small councils may not have access to professional procurement resources — one potential solution is to create a procurement shared service with another council. The purpose of this paper is to focus on evidence of the emergence and existence of inter-organisational procurement shared services and its benefits; a structural approach significantly different from the intra-organisational centralised/decentralised organisational models and the use of consortia. Design/methodology/approach — Case studies, making use of stakeholder, semi-structured interviews, were used to probe the experience of six English procurement shared-services covering 15 councils. Findings — The findings demonstrate evidence of that some smaller councils are benefiting from collaborating in inter-organisational procurement shared service. The collaborations were engaged in strategic procurement initiatives which would not have otherwise been possible through the use of consortia. However, there was an absence, within the cases, of formal business cases and strategy. Research limitations/implications — The paper provides evidence that procurement shared services can be inter-organisational delivering the benefits of intra-organisational "hard core/soft core" procurement structures and inter-organisational consortia. The paper also suggests that the benefits gained from procurement shared services have more akin to inter-organisational collaboration than intra-organisational shared services. This research is limited in that it only relates to the experience of a purposive sample of small councils that had already decided to pursue a procurement shared service. The research limitations also include the absence of a political perspective. Practical implications — A procurement shared service appears a viable structural option for smaller councils, whether they have, or have not currently, access to a procurement professional. The research highlights the need to adopt an incremental approach and also sets out suggestions for a strategic approach to shared services procurement strategy. Originality/value — There is an absence of literature on delivering procurement as a shared service, and shared services in general — in that respect this paper represents research into a new emerging procurement structural model, not previously reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the incremental approach to the marketisation of the English National Health Service (NHS) since the introduction of an 'internal market' in 1990 until the 2010 White Paper, 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS', and the subsequent Health and Social Care Bill published in January 2011. The introduction of a competitive market for a universal, tax-financed health system requires fundamental changes in regulation in order that market bureaucracy can be substituted for direct management. The components of reform are insufficiently captured by the framework of hierarchies and networks in new public management theories of decentralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reform of the British National Health Service (NHS) as a result of the white paper "Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS," which proposes to devolve the power and responsibility for commissioning services to local consortia of general practitioner (GP) practices. Commissioning activities include the identification of the community's health needs and obtaining the most cost-effective services and treatments. It is argued that practice nurses have the knowledge and skills from which commissioning can benefit.

This article provides an introduction to seamlessUK from the perspective of a partner project called PINpoint. Medway PINpoint is establishing a local portal which will become part of seamlessUK, enabling one search to retrieve local and national information. seamlessUK is a New Opportunities Fund Digitisation project developing a citizens' gateway delivered through local portals. seamlessUK will provide a single point of search and retrieval for selected local, regional and national data sources. Emphasis is on improving access to community information but it will also support lifelong learning, active citizenship and digital literacy. The project is a partnership of local authorities and data providers, headed by Essex County Council, supported by core partners Fretwell-Downing Informatics (FDi) (technical developer) and MDR Partners (project management). seamlessUK builds on standards and takes account of e-Government Interoperability Framework and e-Government Metadata Schema. A thesaurus and geographical information system are being implemented to enhance search precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on British charity Wellcome Trust's announcement that its spending budget for biomedical project would go up by 60%. Its investment in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have paid off, as exemplified by the publication by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. GWAS was built on the advances in the technology behind SNP identification and genotyping.