Something old, something new or something blue? Early reflections on (yet another) health reform in England.

Since the publication of the White Paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS on NHS reform in July 2010 the Government has been embroiled in a running debate about the future of the NHS. How new are these proposals and to what extent do they build on the past? This paper will discuss some of the key proposed changes and current experience in developments in England. The presentation will examine some of the experience of newly formed clinical commissioning groups but also examine whether the new policies are an advance towards the market being driven by the Conservative Party as many healthcare professionals, patients and coalition and opposition politicians fear.

Speaker:
Stephen Peckham BSc., MA(Econ), HMFPH
Reader in Health Policy
Director Policy Research Unit in Commissioning and the Healthcare System
Stephen Peckham is Reader in Health Policy in the department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Director of the Department of Health Funded Policy Research Unit in Commissioning and the Healthcare System. From 2005 to 2008 he was an academic advisor to the NIHR Service Delivery and Organisation and both Academic and Centre Director of the Research Programme National Co-ordinating Centre from 2008. He previously worked in local government and the voluntary sector and has been a Research Fellow at the University of the West of England and the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of Southampton. Between 1999 and 2005 he was Head of Sociology and Social Policy at Oxford Brookes University. His main research interests are in health policy analysis, service delivery and organisation, primary care and public health. Current research includes evaluation of new clinical commissioning groups, examining patient and public involvement in commissioning, exploring the public health role of general practice and evaluating health system change in London. He has published widely on health and social policy and health services research with books on primary care, health and social policy and public health ethics.

The 3MT UBC semi-finals are complete after a stellar effort from our three competitors – Stephen Pan, Jason Tan de Bibiana and Alden Blair.

* Congratulations to Alden Blair - awarded the People's Choice award.
* Congratulations to Jason Tan de Bibiana - awarded runner-up in the UBC semi-final and now progressing to the UBC final.


Please support Jason at the UBC final on Friday March 2 at 12pm in the Graduate Student Centre Ballroom 6371 Crescent Road.

Presenter: Melissa Friesen, PhD
National Institutes of Health / National Cancer Institute

Each year at the UBC's Celebrate Research Week delivers on the promise of its name with dozens of fascinating and informative events open to the UBC community and the general public.

One of the most prestigious event of Celebrate Research Week is the annual Wyman Lecture and the Killam Conversation. This year it is being held on Friday, March 2, 2012, 4-6 pm in the Dodson Room (#302) at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 1961 East Mall (V6T 1Z1). Everyone is cordially invited to attend.

This year's Wyman Lecture is presented by Dr. Robert G. Evans, O.C., Professor Emeritus, Economics and Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, UBC.

Lecture Details:
"It Seemed Like a Good Idea... Innovation in a Wider Context"
The conviction that innovation will make the world a better place seems at present virtually universal. Research is then celebrated as the key to more rapid innovation, although the connection is not as direct as we researchers would like to think. But the recent success of Dutch researchers in genetically modifying the highly lethal H5N1 (bird flu) virus to make it more readily transmissible among humans, might at least give us pause. More generally, the inevitability of both unintended consequences, and of intended but malign consequences, implies that the uncritical celebration and promotion of innovation must rest on an underlying presumption either that innovations are universally, on balance, benign, or that our societies embody processes to screen out or suppress any adverse effects. Good luck with that.

The Killam Conversation is generated between Dr. Evans and a panel of UBC-based scholars:

Dr. Michael Law (moderator)
Faculty, Centre for Health Services and Policy Research,
Assistant Professor, School of Population and Public Health

Dr. Gillian Hanley
Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Population and Public Health

Ms. Lindsay Hedden
PhD Candidate, School of Population and Public Health

Dr. Barbara Mintzes
Member, Drug Assessment Working Group, Therapeutics Initiative
Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics

Dr. Craig Mitton
Senior Scientist, Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, VGH
Associate Professor, School of Population and Public Health

The event demonstrates the tremendous contributions of the Killam Trusts to advance research at UBC, supporting faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The Wyman Lecture is in honour of the late Robert Wyman, Killam Trustee (1987-2007) and Chancellor Emeritus of UBC. Mr. John Montalbano, a Killam Trustee, will introduce the event.