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One hundred years since the vote was first extended to women in the UK and over 140 years since women were allowed to train as doctors in Britain, do we have equality of power for women in healthcare, either as professionals or as patients?

One of the things that really excited me about joining Kaleidoscope was the chance to be in at the beginning of a new organisation. Well, almost. I was a second-wave recruit. I missed the intoxicating early days and the heroic attempts to capture the essence of the emerging company on a huge sheet of brown wrapping paper known as the Fish.

Inspired by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Dr Suzette Woodward writes on the power of social movements and what it takes to make an impact.

As the NHS has restructured over the years we have taken professional tribes and overlaid them with organisational tribes – commissioner and provider, hospital and community, physical and mental health, health and social care. Sometimes we recognise this, and we learn to speak each other’s dialect – but all too often we simply adopt a new jargon – the “special words used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand.” And we hold on to our positional power.

Annual funding for the NHS is falling ever further behind increases in activity costs. The government’s promise in 2015 of an additional “£8bn” assumed heroic savings of £22bn over a five year Parliament, which health policy experts think unattainable. The NHS now has the biggest deficit in its history.