Today's news saw the General Medical Council report that the number of complaints in the UK made about doctors has risen 23% in the past year. As the GMC pointed out, a rise in complaints doesn't necessarily mean declining standards of care, rather it may be due to rising expectations and an increasing willingness of the part of the public to complain.
I did my PhD from 1998-2001 comparing welfare reform in Buffalo, New York State to Sheffield in the UK. When asking to explain how the two systems were different for the lone parents experiencing them and which was more successful my short-hand was that the mandatory US system was better at moving lone parents into work, whilst the UK voluntary system of the then New Deal for Lone Parents was better at lifting lone parents out of poverty. So really, it depended on what your end game was.
Michael Gove's decision to overturn internal advice of the School Playing Fields Advisory board has once again brought to light the difficulties politicians can have with advisory boards.
At Nesta we are managing the Innovation in Giving fund backed through £10 million from the Cabinet Office. The fund is investing in, supporting and growing innovative ideas that will bring about a step-change in the giving and exchange of time, assets, skills, resources and money.
I've been fascinated by work and books theorising the changing nature of work since I started my PhD on work and poverty in 1998. Since then I have mainly read books on low-paid work and the lives of people who have to get by in jobs that barely enable them to make ends meet. After a gap of some years it was time this year to catch up on what more recent books were saying about the future of work.
Both Bad Science by Ben Goldacre and The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson make a strong case for standing up for rigorous science and the importance of pointing out when science is misunderstood and misused in politics and the media.
The UK's comparative advantage in developing the impact investment market, together with the relatively small size of supply relative to present and future demand, provides an opportunity for the UK to lead the world in investing in public and social innovation, and in developing innovations in ways of financing for impact. The Impact Investment industry could be a great British success story.
The impact investment market is increasing its focus on defining, evidencing and measuring the impact of organisations receiving finance and of the organisations providing it.
In our last blog post we looked at how the shift to outcomes based purchasing in the public sector is changing the nature of demand for impact investment, and how investors are responding to that.
As we discussed in the first of these blogs, the UK impact investment market developed initially through a desire to see better access to capital for registered charities and other traditional social sector organisations.
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