More frontline NHS staff such as practice nurses, GP’s and other primary care professionals are to be recruited as part of a 30 million pound package of extra investment to deliver better and faster care in Scotland’s 1,000 GP practices and health centres.The investment is aimed at improving access and waiting times for patients to see a local GP or nurse, enabling GP’s to spend more time with their patients, and to shift care and support to a local level for people with chronic diseases like asthma and diabetes, allowing many more patients to be treated close to their own homes.

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Pilots to modernise NHS cancer services have dramatically cut the time patients have to wait for treatment.Patients treated by the ‘Cancer Service Collaboratives’ pilots waited an average of two and a half weeks less for their treatment than before the pilots started work. The 51 pilots, established in November 1999, have seen 8,432 cancer patients – streamlining services, working smarter and more efficiently.

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By Mary MidgleyGaia – the idea of life on earth as a single, self-sustaining system – is a big idea for the twenty-first century. It can help to provide solutions for many of the large problems which conventional politics is failing to address, from global warming to mental health and well-being. Mary Midgley sets out the scientific and intellectual origins of Gaian thinking, showing how it presents a deep challenge to the conceptual structures which guide our everyday thinking and behaviour. In particular, Midgley argues, the tendency of modern science to present itself as an inert store of neutral, ‘objective’ facts obscures the reality that scientific thinking has profound moral and social implications. It makes assumptions rooted in an Enlightenment view of the world which separated humans from the world they inhabit, obscuring the connections between rational thought, imagination and feeling. The result is that we are trapped in a narrow, individualistic view of society drawn from the seventeenth century, and that this view prevents us from thinking beyond recent theories of neo-Darwinism. This pamphlet sets a new moral agenda which will help to change the way we think about ourselves and the planet. It has important implications for public policy, from the governance of science to roads and car tax.

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