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The NHS is hiding delays to care for millions of patients

Covid has created an urgent need, and a unique opportunity, to get the true waiting list out in the open.

The English waiting list continues to break new records in the aftermath of Covid, and even the Secretary of State says it could reach 13 million patients. But the referral-to-treatment data – bad as it is – doesn’t reveal the full scale of the backlog, partly because not all waiting lists fall under RTT rules, but also because the RTT waiting list data is inaccurate and incomplete.

The scale of these hidden delays could be vast - millions of patients. Some could wait for years, some indefinitely, always taking second place to the swelling RTT waiting list and the targets that surround it. Some patients who need urgent care will end up with disability or death. Others are already in terrible pain. All deserve better.

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Source: HSJ (Paywalled). 20 September 2021

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The NHS is failing our children, says top children’s doctor

Children are being forgotten by the government as they face “disgraceful” waiting times for NHS treatment, Britain’s top paediatric doctor has warned.

Dr Camilla Kingdon said children are being failed because their care is not being treated as a priority, despite considerable progress having been made in reducing waiting times for adults.

In her final interview as president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, she also issued a stark warning over the impact of poverty on young people’s health, lamenting the rise in the number of children being treated for severe lung disease due to damp and poor ventilation in inadequate housing.

Many parents cannot afford to be at their dying or sick child’s bedside because of financial pressures – an issue that has grown significantly worse in the past five years, she said.

She told The Independent: “Children simply need to be made a priority. We cannot afford to be ignoring this problem.”

The latest NHS figures show that the backlog for children’s hospital care has risen again, increasing from 387,000 in August to 412,000 in January, despite the adult waiting list having fallen since October.

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Source: The Independent, 31 March 2024

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The NHS In England: Patient safety news roundup from Harvard Law

There is always a lot happening with patient safety in the NHS (National Health Service) in England. Sadly, all too often patient safety crises events occur. The NHS is also no sloth when it comes to the production of patient safety policies, reports, and publications. These generally provide excellent information and are very well researched and produced. Unfortunately, some of these can be seen to falter at the NHS local hospital implementation stage and some reports get parked or forgotten. This is evident from the failure of the NHS to develop an ingrained patient safety culture over the years. Some patient safety progress has been made, but not enough when the history of NHS policy making in the area is analysed.

Lessons going unlearnt from previous patient safety event crises is also an acute problem. Patient safety events seem to repeat themselves with the same attendant issues.

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Source: Harvard Law, 17 February 2020

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The NHS hidden waiting lists terrifying patients

Patients are facing delays stuck on hidden waiting lists that do not show up in the official figures in England, a BBC News investigation reveals.

The published waiting list stands at 7.6 million - but the true scale of the backlog is thought to be much higher.

This is because patients needing ongoing care are not automatically included in those figures - even if they face major delays.

NHS England said hospitals should be monitoring and counting such cases.

But BBC News found evidence suggesting this is not always the case.

The problem affects patients receiving ongoing care, as well as those removed from waiting lists even before starting treatment.

BBC News has spoken to patients waiting months and even years for vital treatment, such as cancer care, spinal treatment and others at risk of going blind because of deteriorating eyesight.

Hospitals are meant to return patients facing unnecessary delays to the waiting list to ensure they are counted in the backlog figures.

But of 30 NHS trusts asked by BBC News how regularly this was happening, only three could provide figures.

Karen Hyde, from Insource, a company that helps hospitals manage waiting lists, said the guidance was "commonly ignored".

"This is a huge issue. The NHS does not incentivise hospitals to keep a close eye on these patients.

"We know there are long waits for those on the waiting list. For those not on the official waiting list, it is likely to be even worse - but the figures are not published."

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Source: BBC News, 19 February 2024

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The NHS Covid legacy - long waits and lives at risk

Covid has left a toxic legacy for the NHS, with hospitals facing a huge backlog, putting lives at risk, patient groups and staff are warning.

And in-depth analysis by BBC News has found:

  • waiting lists have ballooned at some hospitals in England, with more than one out of every 10 of patients in a quarter of trusts left at least a year without treatment
  • major disruption to cancer services, with some hospitals struggling to treat half of their patients within the target time of two months
  • concern growing for 45,000 "missing cancer patients", after drops in GP referrals and screening services across the UK.

Elaine Walsh was diagnosed with womb cancer in January. She should have been operated on within weeks, but her operation was cancelled because of the pandemic and the backlog it had caused.

Elaine's story is not unique. Analysis by BBC News shows the numbers starting treatment within the target time have fallen during the pandemic.

And some trusts are struggling to start treatment for even half of patients in the recommended timeframe - two months following an urgent referral from their GP.

About one in every four of the patients waiting the longest has postponed treatment themselves - and nurses at the trust have been phoning and pleading with them to have treatment.

This reluctance to come forward coupled with problems accessing GP and screening services at points in the pandemic is the reason why the number of patients coming forward for checks and being diagnosed has dropped.

Analysis by Macmillan Cancer Support suggests across the UK there are 45,000 "missing" cancer patients.

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Source: BBC News, 13 May 2021

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The new Angel of Death: The chilling comparisons between killer nurses Lucy Letby and Beverley Allitt - from befriending parents to stealing medical notes and passing the blame

In 1991, Stuart Clifton was a detective superintendent with Lincolnshire Police when a phone call came in from Grantham Hospital saying they were looking into a number of suspicious deaths on a children's ward.

Over a period of just 59 days four babies had died after being brought to Ward Four with minor complaints, such as chest infections and gastroenteritis. A further nine had collapsed for inexplicable reasons, only to be resuscitated again.

Two years later, a 22-year-old nurse called Beverley Allitt would be convicted of those crimes. Dubbed The Angel Of Death, she was handed 13 life sentences and to this day remains locked up in Rampton Hospital, a secure psychiatric facility.

Why would a young woman trained to care for the most vulnerable members of society instead choose to harm and, ultimately, kill them?

As the detective who interviewed and analysed the behaviour of Allitt in the two years it took to bring the case to court, Mr Clifton believes he has unrivalled insight into why a nurse would go from healer to harmer.

"She always seemed to want to be the centre of attention,' he explains of Allitt. 'She wanted to be the one that was present, the one that raised the alarm, the one that went in the ambulance with the child when it was transferred to another hospital. It was almost as if she was putting herself centre stage and felt that she needed that adoration from other nursing staff and parents.

"Maybe a part of this was to show she was capable of doing the job but then, obviously, it went further. It went to the stage of her causing the injury that she subsequently then highlighted. I think certainly with Allitt it was this desire to be recognised, to be needed - and what I have seen of the Letby trial also seems to echo that need."

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Source: Mail Online, 23 August 2023

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The mystery of the capital’s ‘high-volume’ treatment centres

Next Thursday we’ll see more waiting list data released.

What is contained in it is probably why Sir David Sloman’s office has taken nearly a month to not answer this question: Your letter to system leaders said you would “eliminate” 52-week waits, by when?

The regional director’s office could not answer, nor could it reveal which hospitals were going to be the high-volume centre to burn through the lists in the six major specialities.

There are a couple of likely reasons for their not being able to say when the long waiters would be eliminated.

NHSI/E’s phase three letter set “mad” targets that don’t feel very real to many on the ground. I/E central will know this and have their own reasons for setting stretching-to-the-point-of-snapping targets, but trusts don’t really want to be held to submitting impossible commitments then being chastised for missing them (management teams have been moved on for this kind of thing in less fraught times).

The second reason is that the picture is likely to be scary and also to have an impact on the ongoing three-way negotiation between the NHS, the independent sector - which will be hosting a lot of this work - and the workforce that will actually do it in both places.

There is even less transparency than usual from the regional director’s office and I/E generally when asked anything at all about how effectively private sector facilities are being used, or how much it is costing.

Much more surprising is the fact that Sir David’s office cannot yet name where each of the ICS’s six high-volume centres will be.

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Source: HSJ, 1 October 2020

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The mothers fighting a scandal bigger than thalidomide: ‘We were told the medication was safe’

In 2009, Emma Murphy took a phone call from her sister that changed her life. “At first, I couldn’t make out what she was saying; she was crying so much,” Murphy says. “All I could hear was ‘Epilim’.” This was a brand name for sodium valproate, the medication Murphy had been taking since she was 12 to manage her epilepsy.

Her sister explained that a woman, Janet Williams, on the local news had claimed that taking the drug during her pregnancies had harmed her children. She was appealing for other women who might have experienced this to come forward.

Murphy found the news segment that evening and watched it. “I was just stunned,” she says. “Watching that, I knew. I knew there and then that my children had been affected.”

At that point, Murphy was a mother to five children, all under six, and married to Joe, a taxi driver in Manchester. “My kids are fabulous, all of them, but I’d known for years that something was wrong,” she says. “They weren’t meeting milestones. There was delayed speech, slowness to crawl, not walking. There was a lot of drooling – that was really apparent. They were poorly, with constant infections. I was always at the doctors with one of them."

A call between Murphy and Janet Williams was the start of an incredible partnership. It led to the report published this month by England’s patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes, which recommended a compensation scheme for families of children harmed by valproate taken in pregnancy. Hughes has suggested initial payments of £100,000 and described the damage caused by the drug as “a bigger scandal than thalidomide”. It is estimated that 20,000 British children have been exposed to the drug while in the womb.

Williams and Murphy have campaigned relentlessly to reach this point. It is by no means the endpoint – even now, an estimated three babies are born each month having been exposed to the drug. Together, the women formed In-Fact (the Independent Fetal Anti Convulsant Trust) to find and support families like theirs. They were instrumental in the creation of an all-party parliamentary group to raise awareness in government. 

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Source: The Guardian, 22 February 2024

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The Morecombe Bay scandal took my baby’s life – history has repeated itself and the NHS must act now

In March 2015, the Morecambe Bay investigation, chaired by Dr Bill Kirkup, published its report into serious failures in care that led to the avoidable deaths of 11 babies and a mother at Furness General Hospital (FGH) between 2004 and 2012. One of the babies that died was James Titcombe's son, Joshua.

The report described a seriously dysfunctional maternity unit where certain midwives pursued an “over-zealous” approach to promoting “normal” childbirth, relationships between doctors and midwives was poor, midwifery practice fell well below acceptable standards and, unforgivably, instances of avoidable harm and death were covered up – meaning lessons were not learned and similar failures were repeated year after year. 

The report detailed how opportunities to intervene at Morecambe Bay were missed at all levels and how the families who raised concerns were treated as problems to be managed, rather than voices that needed to be heard. More than four years later, it is both tragic and distressing to read about the litany of failures identified in the leaked interim report into care at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust (SaTH). Far from events at Morecambe Bay being a “one-off”, it is now painfully clear that not only have similar failures in care occurred elsewhere, but that they have happened on an even larger scale.

James, speaking to The Independent, says "Worryingly, the reason why we are reading about these issues now isn’t because the regulatory system identified a problem and called for further scrutiny, but rather because of the extraordinary efforts of bereaved families."

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Source: The Independent, 21 November 2019

 

 

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The moment I knew something was wrong at the Tavistock

A damning report last year from Dr Hilary Cass into the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) found that it was putting children at “considerable risk”. Her full report is due to be published later this year.

Whistleblower Dr Anna Hutchinson, a senior clinical psychologist at GIDS, describes when she realised something was very wrong.

“I just couldn’t comfortably keep being part of a process that was, I felt, putting children — but also my colleagues — at risk,” Hutchinson explains. Faced with no discernible action from the executive, staff began to look for other ways to raise their concerns, to other people who might listen — and act. Hutchinson approached the Tavistock’s Freedom to Speak Up guardian. At least four other colleagues did the same in 2017. That same year, another four clinicians took their concerns outside GIDS to the children’s safeguarding lead for the Tavistock trust."

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Source: The Times, 13 February 2023

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The millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo

When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis—a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints—and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens.

Normally, she’d be confident about avoiding infections, even in a hospital setting. This felt different. “We didn’t have enough tests, it was probably around us everywhere, and I’m walking around every day with insufficient antibodies and hamstrung T-cells,” she said.

Two years later, Covid-19 is still all around us, everywhere, and millions of people like Landon are walking around with a compromised immune system. A significant proportion of them don’t respond to Covid vaccines, so despite being vaccinated, many are still unsure whether they’re actually protected—and some know that they aren’t. Much of the United States dropped COVID restrictions long ago; many more cities and states are now following. That means policies that protected Landon and other immunocompromised people, including mask mandates and vaccination requirements, are disappearing, while accommodations that benefited them, such as flexible working options, are being rolled back.

This isn’t a small group. Close to 3% of US adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised people.

In the past, immunocompromised people lived with their higher risk of infection, but COVID represents a new threat that, for many, has further jeopardised their ability to be part of the world. From the very start of the pandemic, some commentators have floated the idea “that we can protect the vulnerable and everyone else can go on with their lives.” Seth Trueger, who is on immunosuppressants for an autoimmune complication of cancer, said. “How’s that supposed to work?”

He is an emergency doctor at Northwestern Medicine; he can neither work from home nor protect himself by avoiding public spaces. “How am I supposed to provide for my family or live my life if there’s a pandemic raging?” he said. 

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Source: The Atlantic, 16 February 2022

Further reading

Read further Covid-19 blogs and stories from staff on the frontline

 

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The mesh saga — still a mess

A call for action on the one-year anniversary since the Cumberlege report was published will be happening in Parliament today and is being led by MP Emma Hardy and Shadow Health Minister Alex Norris. 

Emma Hardy, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (AAPG) has said “Women deserve better than the Government’s refusal to implement the Baroness Cumberlege recommendations. The recommendations will not only make life better for those living with mesh complications, they will also improve patient safety for everyone in the future.”

Read full story.

Source: Medical Plastics News, 07 July 2021

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The mesh in my body is a 'ticking time bomb'

Sam Hindle has 23cm of polypropylene mesh in her body and lives in constant fear that it will become unstable and cause irreversible damage.

"You are in your own Battle Royale, strapped to a time bomb, and thinking when is it going to go off," she told the BBC.

Sam, 46, is one of hundreds of women in Scotland who have suffered life-changing symptoms since they had a transvaginal mesh implant.

After years of campaigning by the women, the Scottish government has promised it will cover the costs of mesh removal at private clinics in the UK and US.

But Sam has been waiting more than two years just for a referral to the Complex Mesh Surgical Service in Glasgow to start the process.

The Scottish government announced last year that it had signed a contract to allow NHS patients to visit a US expert for mesh removal surgery

The contract with Gynaecologic and Reconstructive Surgery of Missouri, where Dr Dionysios Veronikis operates, follows a similar contract agreed with Spire Healthcare in Bristol.

The cost of each removal procedure is estimated to be £16,000 to £23,000. But in order to access such treatment, women have to be assessed by the national service in Glasgow.

Women like Sam say there are waiting years to just get referred for assessment. With further delays for appointments and then waits for surgery.

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Source: BBC News, 2 March 2023

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The mesh fightback begins: How thousands of women are being left in agony on waiting lists

"What has happened to us is home-grown, institutionalised female genital mutilation," says Mary Lodato, 63, a mother of three and a university researcher, from Kettering in Northamptonshire.

"It has been a systemic failure in health and care and it was totally avoidable."

What Mary is referring to are complications due to implanted surgical mesh, designed to treat post-childbirth pelvic damage in women, which has left thousands effectively crippled as the material disintegrated inside their bodies, and sheared into the tissue, causing a range of devastating symptoms including pain, difficulty walking and sexual dysfunction.

An eight-year Good Health campaign to get official recognition of the problem led to the establishment of a government inquiry under the leadership of former Conservative health minister Baroness Julia Cumberlege.

Although the inquiry report was published in July 2020, some of its key recommendations have still not been implemented, leaving thousands of women suffering and not getting the help they need.

Seven specialist NHS mesh removal clinics were meant to open in April this year in London, Cambridge, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Leicester. But the affected women claim a shortage of specialists has meant that only two are functioning — at University College London Hospital and Southmead Hospital in Bristol (which was not on the original list).

They also say that it's extremely difficult to get a referral to one of these new centres and even if they do, waiting times can stretch into years.

"To the doctors who originally treated us, these operations weren't anything major — but to us it was a catastrophically painful loss of work, family life and intimacy," says Mary. 

Mary's story is one familiar to almost 10,000 women who have joined an anti-mesh group called Sling the Mesh, and a number of other support organisations.

Read full story

Source: Mail Online, 1 November 2021

Blogs from Kath Sansom, Sling the Mesh

Regulatory flaws: Women were catastrophically failed in the mesh, Primodos and Sodium Valproate tragedies

Ineffective medical device recalls are a patient safety scandal

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The mental health patients dying on NHS wards from starvation and neglect

Asystemic failure to provide basic physical care on NHS mental health wards is killing patients across the country, despite scores of warnings from coroners over the past decade, The Independent can reveal.

An investigation has uncovered at least 50 “prevention of future death” reports – used by coroners to warn health services of widespread failures – since 2012, involving 26 NHS trusts and private healthcare providers.

Cases include deaths caused by malnutrition, lack of exercise, and starvation in patients detained in mental health facilities. Experts warn that poor training and a lack of funding are factors in the neglect of vulnerable patients.

The Independent investigation uncovered:

  • Staff failing to carrying out basic health checks, such as assessment for risk of blood clots.
  • Cases of nurses and care assistants without adequate CPR training.
  • Doctors unable to carry out emergency response procedures.
  • Patients not treated for side effects of antipsychotic medication.
  • Rapidly deteriorating health going unnoticed and untreated.

Coroners have exposed multiple cases of mental health patients receiving inadequate treatment in general hospitals, with their illness being mistaken for a psychiatric problem.

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Source: The Independent, 18 December 2022

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The medical school trying to become anti-racist

A major British medical school is leading the drive to eliminate what it calls "inherent racism" in the way doctors are trained in the UK.

The University of Bristol Medical School says urgent action is needed to examine why teaching predominantly focuses on how illnesses affect white people above all other sections of the population.

It comes after students pushed for reform, saying gaps in their training left them ill-prepared to treat ethnic minority patients – potentially compromising patient safety.

Hundreds of other UK medical students have signed petitions demanding teaching that better reflects the diversity of the country.

The Medical School Council (led by the heads of UK medical schools) and the regulator, the General Medical Council, say they are putting plans in place to improve the situation.

A number of diseases manifest differently depending on skin tone, but too little attention is given to this in training, according to Dr Joseph Hartland, who is helping to lead changes at the University of Bristol Medical School.

"Historically medical education was designed and written by white middle-class men, and so there is an inherent racism in medicine that means it exists to serve white patients above all others," he said .

"When patients are short of breath, for example, students are often taught to look out for a constellation of signs – including a blue tinge to the lips or fingertips – to help judge how severely ill someone is, but these signs can look different on darker skin."

"Essentially we are teaching students how to recognise a life-or-death clinical sign largely in white people, and not acknowledging these differences may be dangerous," said Dr Hartland.

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Source: BBC News, 17 August 2020

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The key NHS targets that have never been met

Most key NHS targets have been missed for at least seven years across the UK, BBC News research shows.

The review of records going back 20 years also reveals Northern Ireland and Wales have never met the four-hour accident-and-emergency (A&E) target.

The analysis focused on the three key hospital targets, covering A&E, cancer and waiting times for planned care.

In the past seven, the only one to have been met is the A&E target in Scotland - and that was during lockdown in 2020, when the number of visits to A&E plummeted.

All four nations said improving waiting times was a priority and investment was being made.

But King's Fund think tank chief analyst Siva Anandaciva said the findings should "act as a wake-up call".

"These are the key totemic targets," he said. "The length of time they have been missed is incredible."

Patients groups warned the delays were putting patients at risk.

Patients Association chief executive Rachel Power said the analysis showed the NHS was in "permacrisis".

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Source: BBC News, 10 January 2024

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The Irish Times view on medicines: A need for vigilance

The Health Products Regulatory Agency (HPRA) has revealed an increase in the number of adverse reaction reports to medicines as well as a rise in product recalls and quality defects in 2018. With more than 250 Irish patients dying last year while on treatment with medicines where an adverse reaction had been reported, should we be alarmed?

The number of adverse reaction reports received by the authority last year more than doubled. It says the increase is largely accounted for by a new requirement to include non-serious reports of adverse reactions in addition to serious ones. Particular risk factors include age extremes, the prescribing of multiple drug types, co-morbidity and genetics. But in truth reporting of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in the Republic has never been comprehensive. It is estimated that less than 5% of all ADRs are reported in practice. A 2018 Irish study found that 43% of hospital doctors and 35% of GPs had never reported a suspected ADR.

Medication safety is an important patient safety issue. Working together, and with increased education, healthcare professionals and the public can do more to increase vigilance.

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Source: The Irish Times, 28 October 2019

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The Independent Medicines and Medical Device Safety Review: Patient reference group members wanted

The Department of Health & Social Care are working with Traverse, a research organisation, to appoint 15 people to a patient reference group. This group will work with DHSC as it develops and implements the Government’s response to the Report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review (IMMDS Review).

What will the group be doing?

  • Meeting online to share experiences, ideas and recommendations.
  • Helping to shape the Government’s response to the IMMDS Review, ensuring that patient voices are heard in the process.
  • Providing advice, challenge, and scrutiny as the Government implements its response.

They are looking for people who:

  • Have a personal experience of or understand the context of the IMMDS Review.
  • Are committed to improving the experience of patients.
  • Want to engage with others on the group and DHSC representatives to support the development and implementation of the Government’s response to the IMMDS Review.
  • Can consider complex and emotive issues in a balanced and sensitive way.
  • Have good communication skills, and want to build strong working relationships with the rest of the group.

They are also looking for a co-chair to support group members contribute to the group and make sure group members are heard. If you know the English healthcare system well and are comfortable working on sensitive issues, take a look at the recruitment pack to find out more about the co-chair role and how to apply.

If you are interested in getting involved, contact IMMDSRPatientGroup@traverse.ltd for the recruitment pack and more information on how to apply.

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The ICSs ‘diverting’ the most GP referrals through controversial model

There is huge regional variation in the rate at which health systems are preventing patients joining the elective waiting list through “advice and guidance” to GPs, according to analysis by HSJ.

Some systems – including Northamptonshire – have managed to ramp up these “diverts” to such an extent that they now report around one A&G case to every 3.5 cases cleared from the waiting list through treatment or seeing a consultant.

This contrasts with others, such as Lancashire and South Cumbria, which only reports one A&G case for every 16 cleared from the waiting list.

Advice and guidance involves GPs consulting specialists before making direct referrals and around half the time this results in a referral being avoided. The model is set to be a cornerstone of NHS England’s new outpatient transformation strategy, which is due imminently.

Victoria Tzortziou-Brown, vice chair of the Royal College of GPs, said the analysis “confirms reports we’ve heard from our members – that there is too much regional variation in the use of the ‘advice and guidance’”.

She added: “Some GPs report that when advice and guidance is properly resourced and well implemented, it can be a helpful tool for improving communications with their colleagues in secondary care.

“[But] it is clear that more time, funding and capacity needs to be dedicated to allow clinicians to communicate efficiently and effectively whilst respecting professionalism.”

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Source: HSJ, 9 April 2024

Related reading on the hub:

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The huge growth in long-term prescription of strong painkillers

Almost 180,000 patients have been prescribed strong painkillers every month for two years, a rise of over a third compared to levels recorded just before the pandemic, data obtained by HSJ shows.

The figures collected by the NHS Business Services Authority showed 179,353 patients had been prescribed an opioid analgesic every month between April 2021 and March 2023, a 36% increase compared with 131,876 receiving the same prescription between April 2017 and March 2019. 

Guidelines issued by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in 2021 advised clinicians not to prescribe opioids to manage chronic pain. A statement published alongside an earlier draft of these guidelines explained: “While there was little or no evidence that they made any difference to people’s quality of life, pain or psychological distress, there was evidence that they can cause harm, including possible addiction.”

In 2020, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency asked healthcare professionals to discuss the risks of dependency and addiction with any patient taking or planning to take an opioid-containing medicine and made sure such warnings were reinforced in the patient information leaflet. The regulator at the time defined long-term use as longer than three months.

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Source: HSJ, 18 August 2023

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The harsh reality of underfunding at Whipps Cross University Hospital

Following Boris Johnson's confrontation by an angry father at Whips Cross University Hospital yesterday, a doctor gives anonymous account of chronic understaffing and lack of resources at Whipps Cross. 

"The hospital is held together only by the hard work and dedication of its healthcare workers but it cannot be sustained for much longer under these pressures."

"I’m so glad that Omar Salem  said the things he did. He was just telling the truth about what it is like to be on the receiving end of poor staffing levels and under-resourcing."

"I’ve been thinking about it all day and felt I had to say something because NHS hospitals today can be unsafe places. Whipps Cross is particularly understaffed and under-resourced so people don’t get the care that they need as promptly as they need."

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Source: The Guardian, 19 September 2019

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