Hello everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health.

Today's episode is about what it actually looks like, from the inside, when commercial interests try to shape health policy.

My guest is Elena Whitham, who served as a Member of the Scottish Parliament and as Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy in the Scottish Government. That role put her at the intersection of highly contested territory in public health, where evidence about what works collides with the interests of industries that profit from the products causing harm in the most deprived communities.

In this conversation, Elena reflects on her own life experience navigating challenging circumstances, through to working at the local level to national politics. She discusses what commercial influence on health policy-making actually looks like in practice, how it shaped her thinking and approach, the importance of civil society and academics, what advice she would give to other policy-makers based on her experiences, if they are to make a healthier, more equitable Scotland.

If you are interested in finding out more about some of the issues we discussed, please find some links with further information:

-Responses to a recent consultation on alcohol advertising and promotion: https://consult.gov.scot/alcohol-policy/alcohol-advertising-and-promotion/

-Link to the Public Health Scotland evaluation of Minimum Unit Pricing: https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/evaluating-the-impact-of-minimum-unit-pricing-for-alcohol-in-scotland-a-synthesis-of-the-evidence/

-Latest data release from National Records of Scotland on drug and alcohol deaths in Scotland: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland-2024/

-Link to a resource hub on tools and approaches to addressing commercial drivers of ill-health hosted by our UKRI Population Health Improvement Local Health Global Profits consortium: https://www.bath.ac.uk/campaigns/commercial-determinants-of-health-resource-hub/

Hello everyone and welcome back to Money Power Health. Before we delve into this episode, you will also see that we have launched a substack with essays on the themes of money power and health. You can sign up to that and read them, for free and ad free, in the link in the show notes.

Today’s episode is about the quiet but profound transformation of the UKs national health service. This has been less through a single piece of legislation, but through decades of contracting, outsourcing, and creeping privatisation that often escapes public scrutiny.

My guest is David Rowland, Executive Director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, an independent non-party think tank prmoting a vision of health focused on accountability and the public interest. CHPI has done some of the most rigorous work in the UK tracking how private companies have become embedded within the NHS, from clinical services to back-office functions, and what that means for cost, accountability, transparency, and ultimately, patient care.

In this conversation, we talk about how privatisation actually happens in practice using examples from CHPIs work, and why headline debates about “selling off the NHS” miss the more important question: how market logics and profit-seeking reshape public institutions from the inside out. He discusses what it is like to work with with people who have been harmed through such arrangements and discuss why the impacts of privatisation are not evenly distributed.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Links to some of the topics covered in this conversation are below:

Profit leakage in eye care report: https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/the-local-and-national-impact-of-profit-leakage-in-the-outsourcing-of-nhs-eye-care-services-to-the-private-sector

ADHD outsourcing report: https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/how-the-under-regulated-market-in-nhs-funded-adhd-services

Report on the UK care home industry: https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/plugging-the-leaks-in-the-uk-care-home-industry

Music in this podcast was by Daniel Maani. You can find out more about his art and music here: https://www.danielmaani.com

Hello and welcome back to Money Power Health.

This week we are discussing business schools with Dr. Nora Campbell, Associate Professor of Marketing at Trinity Business School, Dublin, where she teaches in management theory, and science and technology studies.

We delve into the historical role of business schools, the evolution of management theories, and the demands of current students. Norah shares her unique journey from studying French and German to marketing and eventually focusing on the commercial determinants of health. We also touch upon the shift from productivity and efficiency to sustainability and the potential future of education in business schools, how such institutions might reinvent themselves in response to ecological and health imperatives, and what the place is of critical scholarship in such spaces. We end with forward looking reflections, as Norah considers the importance of maintaining a balanced life and critically analyzing the structures within which we all work.

If you would like to find out more about Norah's research, which spans nano-bio-info-cogno markets, climate change, and the food industry, here are some links to recent articles:

The corporate political activity of the food industry in Ireland: an analysis and proposed solutions

https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/Supplement_3/ckae144.1511/7843367

Ultra-Processed Food: The Tragedy of the Biological Commons

https://www.ijhpm.com/article_4359.html

Here are some examples of her public writing:

https://www.irishtimes.com/health/your-wellness/2023/01/30/it-delivers-a-taste-bomb-of-pure-pleasure-but-ultraprocessed-food-is-killing-us/

https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41626909.html

And here is a link to her university profile:

https://www.tcd.ie/business/people/faculty-professors/ncampbe/

The music in this podcast was by Daniel Maani. You can find out more about his music and poetry here: https://www.danielmaani.com