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Social media has the potential to improve communication between healthcare professionals and patients — but it also creates ethical issues. Where should the line be drawn? I love Twitter, some would say I'm addicted! To date I've tweeted more than 30,500 times. As a GP, I think it is an excellent way — along with other social media platforms — to debate and share thoughts and ideas about primary care and the NHS. I also think it has the potential to improve the communication healthcare professionals have with each other, with their patients and with the public. Communicating with my patients...

As a judicial review begins on proposals to close a number of units, Roger Boyle says pooling surgical expertise is a vital move Advances in medicine mean that many young babies with congenital heart disease are alive today who would not have survived treatment in the past. In fact most are going on to school, making friends and living into adulthood. But, with change, expert surgeons and their teams can save even more lives and prevent some of the life-long conditions, such as brain damage, that some children face after surgery. The landmark decision to improve children's heart services by...

Final document sets clear objectives, which reflect priorities managers are already pursuing, but fails on one crucial test The first NHS mandate , which sets out the government's expectations of the health service to the NHS Commissioning Board, hardly represents freedom for managers and clinicians but it at least has the feel of moving to an open prison. After several months of consultation, the final document identifying the priorities for 2013-15 wisely dumps the targets proposed by Andrew Lansley in favour of a focus on improvement. This is more than mere semantics. The health secretary...

Their new position dangles precariously between central and local government – yet despite this there is palpable optimism It is becoming increasingly clear that public health directors will need to exercise fine political judgment if they are to thrive in their new position dangling precariously between central and local government. In some councils their first job may well be to cut services. There are serious concerns that a toxic combination of the wrong amount of money being transferred from primary care trusts, and the new budget holders being locked into large, long-term contracts on everything...

The Patient from Hell welcomes the long-overdue introduction of GS1 codes for improved efficiency in a paperless coding system Dr Hamish Meldrum, outgoing chairman of the BMA, once famously said, the NHS should not be run like a supermarket . Over the years, I have often thought secretly that the NHS would be far more efficient if it adopted some of the business practices of the supermarkets. So, when Sir David Nicholson wrote last month to all NHS trust CEOs, foundation trust CEOs , NHS trust board chairs, directors of finance, and procurement directors saying that they should adopt a standard...

Greater collaboration between health and social care will mean better value for taxpayers and better outcomes for service users, says John Adams It is almost 15 years since the newly-elected Labour prime minister Tony Blair took to the stage at his party's annual conference in Brighton and declared a vision that Britain should be "the best place to grow old". The elderly, he added, should be "cherished and valued to the end of their days". It was with palpable optimism that he announced his desire to challenge the status quo "where the only way pensioners can get long...

The patient from hell asks when the lessons from the WSD will be shared and what the delay means for the future of telecare I am in despair about the future of telecare. You will remember that a trial, called the whole system demonstrator, covering 6000 long-term patients in Kent, Newham and Cornwall, has been chuntering along for about three years. In June last year, a Kings Fund conference announced relatively upbeat preliminary findings for the WSD. The full report was supposed to be imminent. But autumn and winter came and went, and still the report did not appear. We were told that it was...

The passing of health and social care bill is just the beginning, the real test lies in implementing the changes, says Anna Dixon After many long nights spent debating the hundreds of amendments laid before them, members of the House of Lords will have breathed a huge sigh of relief that the health and social care bill has finally been granted royal assent. The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, will be equally relieved but for other reasons. His grand plans to redesign the NHS, developed during six years in opposition, have had a very difficult passage and, after much amendment, the final results...