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Keep up to date with the latest news, research and activity in patient safety.

Plan to increase access to NHS dentists in England ‘a complete failure’, MPs say

The official plan to increase access to NHS dental services in England has been a “complete failure”, and some of the government’s initiatives have worsened the crisis, a damning report warns.
Millions of patients continue to be denied dental care, forcing them to pay for private treatment, build up mountains of credit card debt, or even worse perform dangerous DIY dentistry on their own teeth, the research by MPs found.
Without immediate and significant changes to fix the “broken” system, there would be no future for population-wide access to NHS dentistry, the report by the public accounts committee (PAC) said.
“This country is now years deep in an avalanche of harrowing stories of the impact of dentistry’s system failure,” said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the committee. “It is utterly disgraceful that, in the 21st century, some Britons have been forced to remove their own teeth.”
He added: “Last year’s dental recovery plan was supposed to address these problems, something our report has found it has signally failed to do. Almost unbelievably, the government’s initiatives appear to have actually resulted in worsening the picture, with fewer new patients seen since the plan’s introduction.”
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Source: The Guardian, 4 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

What’s lost: Trump whacks tiny agency that works to make the nation’s healthcare safer

Sue Sheridan’s baby boy, Cal, suffered brain damage from undetected jaundice in 1995. Helen Haskell’s 15-year-old son, Lewis, died after surgery in 2000 because weekend hospital staffers didn’t realize he was in shock. The episodes turned both women into advocates for patients and spurred research that made American healthcare safer.
On 1 April, the Trump administration slashed the organisation that supported that research—the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ—and fired roughly half of its remaining employees as part of a perplexing reorganisation of the federal Health and Human Services Department.
Haskell, of Columbia, South Carolina, has done research and helped write AHRQ-published surveys and guidebooks on patient engagement for hospitals. The dissolution of AHRQ is dislodging scores of experienced patient-safety experts, a brain drain that will be impossible to rectify, she said.
Survey data gathered by AHRQ provides much of what is known about hospitalisations for motor accidents, measles, methamphetamine, and thousands of other medical issues.
“Nobody does these things except AHRQ,” she said. “They’re all we’ve got. And now the barn door’s closed.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on the social platform X on 1 April that layoffs at HHS, aimed at reducing the department’s workforce by about 20,000 employees, were the result of alleged inefficacy. “What we’ve been doing isn’t working,” he said. “Despite spending $1.9 trillion in annual costs, Americans are getting sicker every year.”
But neither Kennedy nor President Donald Trump has explained why individual agencies such as AHRQ were targeted for cuts or indicated whether any of their work would continue.
Read more
Source: Fierce Healthcare, 3 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

USA: More Black babies are dying than white infants

Although the disparity in the number of overall deaths reported between Black and white Americans has narrowed over the course of the last 75 years, researchers say that the same does not hold true for infants.
Black infants are dying at twice the rate of white infants – and it’s largely thanks to healthcare inequality.
“This is like a red alarm,” Harvard University associated professor Dr. Soroush Saghafian explained.
“Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved five million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have,” he told The Harvard Gazette.
The authors analysed mortality data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calculating life expectancy, mortality rates, and years of potential life lost for both white and Black Americas. 
Their analysis found that there was a 20.4 percent increase in life expectancy for Black Americans and a 13 percent rise for white Americans, although Black adults still have an 18 percent higher mortality rate.
The American healthcare system has long been under scrutiny for its astronomical costs and hurdles to patient care. A new study released Wednesday from the West Health Institute has found that the inability to pay for healthcare in the U.S. has reached a new high.
More than a third of Americans – or an estimated 91 million people – report that they could not access quality healthcare if they needed it, according to the latest West Health-Gallup Healthcare Affordability Index.
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Source: The Independent, 2 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

USA: NIH sued over ‘ideological purge’ of DEI, Covid and vaccine research

A group of public health experts and major labor organizations are suing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over what they call an “ongoing ideological purge” of scientific research.
In a legal complaint filed on Wednesday, the American Public Health Association; the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW); and other health experts say the NIH has abruptly canceled hundreds of grants since February 2025.
The complaint says the cuts have targeted research tied to topics like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), gender identity, vaccine hesitancy and even work involving collaborators in other countries. These cancellations, they argue, provide a “window into the devastation to medical and scientific research playing out across the nation right now”.
The lawsuit claims that NIH broke from its usual science-based review process and started shutting down projects based on “vague” new priorities. It alleges that the organization often justified cancellations by saying the research “no longer effectuates agency priorities”.
Researchers affected by the cuts include those studying Alzheimer’s disease, pregnancy health disparities and HIV prevention.
“Ending these NIH grants wastes taxpayer money and years of hard work to answer the world’s most pressing biomedical questions. This is an attack on scientific progress itself,” Brittany Charlton, a plaintiff and associate professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement.
“Important discoveries and treatments will be delayed, putting lives at risk. Health issues in one community affect everyone, so this concerns us all,” Charlton added.
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 2 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Healthcare-related harm affects 1 in 10 NHS patients

Almost one in 10 people reported experiencing harm from NHS care in the past 3 years, according to a survey led by the University of Oxford. 
The study, published in BMJ Quality & Safety, found that 9.7% of respondents reported harm, with 6.2% attributing it to the treatment or care received and 3.5% citing lack of access to services.
Researchers noted that these findings exceed those of two previous British surveys which reported harm rates of 4.8% in 2001 and 2.5% in 2013. While acknowledging that the pandemic’s impact on healthcare access may have contributed to the higher figures, they said that the study highlights issues that “may be hidden from official data on patient safety.” 
As well as the withdrawal of medical care attributed to the pandemic, the increase could also be explained by using a broader definition of harm to include psychological as well as physical harm, the study authors suggested.
Lead author of the new study, Dr Michele Peters, medical sociologist at the University of Oxford, told Medscape News UK : “In the past, harm has usually been measured using clinical rather than patient perspectives.” She explained that this emphasis tended to highlight harm associated with clinical errors rather than harm related to system issues, such as long waits for treatment. 
The latest study is one of the first to explicitly assess actions taken following harm due to lack of access to care. Around half of those awaiting treatment experienced physical or psychological consequences, with longer waits more common in deprived areas.
“Current waiting list management approaches do recognise that some people are particularly vulnerable to deterioration during the waiting period,” Peters said. This means they may end up in poor condition when called for treatment. She noted that some interventions, such as weight management or smoking cessation support, aim to maintain patients’ health while they wait for procedures like hip replacements.
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Source: Medscape, 2 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Doctors urge government to fight poverty after rise in patients with Victorian diseases

Doctors have reported a rise in the number of patients with Victorian diseases such as scabies, as the Royal College of Physicians urged the government to do more to fight poverty.
The survey of 882 doctors found 89% were concerned about the impact of health inequalities on their patients, while 72% had seen more patients in the past three months with illnesses related to poor-quality housing, air pollution and access to transport.
The Royal College of Physicians found 46% of respondents said that at least half of their workload involved illnesses linked to social factors.
One doctor said that they had seen patients with two Victorian skin diseases, erysipelas and scabies, over the past three months. Another said they were seeing more people “with poor nutritional status due to poverty”, eventually leading to “prolonged and impaired recovery from acute illnesses”.
Several patients had contracted hypothermia. One doctor said it was due to the patient not being able to afford heating at home.
The Royal College of Physicians has called on the government to set out how its health mission will address these illnesses.
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 3 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

States sue HHS over $12B in cancelled health funds

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against HHS over the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of billions in public health grants to state health departments. 
The suit, filed April 1 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, alleges HHS’ discontinuation of more than $11 billion in funding to state health departments violates federal law and jeopardises public health. The eliminated funds supported efforts to track infectious diseases, improve pandemic preparedness, expand mental health services and modernize outdated systems. If funding is not restored, states allege key public health programs will be disbanded and thousands of employees could lose their jobs. 
State health departments began receiving notices late March 25 that $11.4 billion in grants from the CDC and roughly $1 billion in funds from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were being rescinded immediately. 
“Slashing this funding now will reverse our progress on the opioid crisis, throw our mental health systems into chaos, and leave hospitals struggling to care for patients,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a news release, adding that the state is set to lose nearly $400 million as part of the cuts. 
The plaintiffs are seeking a temporary restraining order to immediately prevent the funds from being rescinded, as well longer-term injunctions. 
Read full story
Source: Becker's Hospital Review, 1 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Trump officials to cut Planned Parenthood family planning funds

The reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood said the Trump administration would cut federal family planning funding as of Tuesday, affecting birth control, cancer screenings and other services for low-income people.
Planned Parenthood said that nine of its affiliates received notice that funding would be withheld under a programme known as Title X, which has supported healthcare services for the poor since 1970.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week the US Department of Health and Human Services planned an immediate freeze of $27.5m in family planning grants for groups including Planned Parenthood.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, predicted that cancers would go undetected, access to birth control would be severely reduced, and sexually transmitted infections would increase as a result.
“President Trump and Elon Musk are pushing their dangerous political agenda, stripping health care access from people nationwide, and not giving a second thought to the devastation they will cause,” McGill Johnson said in a statement.
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 1 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Almost 1.7 million hernia mesh implanted in NHS in 20 years

Almost 1.7 million people have had hernia mesh surgery in the NHS since 2004, figures released by the NHS have revealed.
The statistics do not include people who’ve had hernia mesh in private hospitals.
Nobody can say how many are now suffering complications – because patients are not tracked for their lifetime.
Yet campaigners and academics globally say it can take many years for mesh to cause problems- so the scale of suffering falls into a black hole of missing data.
Moreover, support groups show that patients are being implanted with hernia mesh in their thousands ever year – but nobody is being given fully informed consent of the potential risks such as pain, loss of mobility, loss of sex life and losing the ability to have children. Also autoimmune diseases and allergies caused by the plastic mesh material.
The figures came to light thanks to a Written Parliamentary Question asked by MP Sharon Hodgson, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for First Do No Harm.
In its response, The Department of Health say: “Clinicians are expected to inform patients about risks associated with recommended treatments, including reasonable alternatives, to enable informed consent and a balanced patient decision.”
But campaign group Sling The Mesh says that the majority of people are told hernia mesh is ‘not the mesh in the media’, or it is a new mesh, or that this is a gold standard treatment and that mesh receives undeserved negative attention.
Read full story
Source: Sling the Mesh, 25 March 2025
Patient Safety Learning

NHS trust apologises as man’s tumour death investigated for manslaughter

A troubled NHS trust has apologised to the family of a man who died after a series of potentially fatal delays to treat a tumour, in a case that is being investigated by police as possible corporate manslaughter.
Richard Harris, 71, died last July after a series of errors in the neurosurgery department at the Royal Sussex County hospital in Brighton, which is part of University Hospitals Sussex NHS foundation trust (UHSussex).
The trust admitted that Harris was “lost to follow-up” when the hospital repeatedly failed to monitor a tumour in his nervous system, or operate on it, as doctors recommended.
An internal review of Harris’s care found that doctors failed to arrange a routine MRI scan for him when he was first urgently referred to neurosurgery in 2017. Harris, who was fit and a regular swimmer, only received a scan when he contacted the department again in 2019.
The scan picked up a benign schwannoma tumour, which a multidisciplinary team concluded would require regular monitoring, every six months. They also said “surgical intervention should be advised”, the review found.
But no surgery was arranged. And the required follow-up scans were postponed and cancelled at a time when internal whistleblowers expressed alarm about high cancellation rates, and repeated and allegedly dangerous failures to follow up patients under the trust’s care.
Eventually Harris was referred to neurosurgery early last year suffering with acute pain. He had to wait weeks to be seen, despite repeatedly pleading with his consultant in emails complaining of “red-hot poker pain” that was “scaring me to death”. There were yet further delays in arranging MRI scans, the review found.
Months later, the tumour was assessed to be cancerous and inoperable. Harris was discharged to hospice care and died a few weeks later.
Sussex police have confirmed to Harris’s family that his death is being investigated as possible corporate manslaughter, as part of its expanding Operation Bramber investigation.
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 1 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Patient satisfaction with NHS has hit record low of 21%, survey finds

Public satisfaction with the NHS is at a record low and dissatisfaction is at its highest, with the deepest discontent about A&E, GP and dental care.
Just 21% of adults in Britain are satisfied with how the health service runs, down from 24% a year before, while 59% are dissatisfied, up from 52%, the latest annual survey of patients found.
Satisfaction has fallen dramatically from the 70% recorded in 2010, the year the last Labour government left office, and the 60% found in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust thinktank, which analysed the data alongside the King’s Fund, said the years since 2019 have seen “a startling collapse in NHS satisfaction.
“It is by far the most dramatic loss of confidence in how the NHS runs that we have seen in 40 years of this survey.”
A&E is the NHS service the public is least happy about. Satisfaction fell from 31% in 2023 to just 19% last year – the lowest proportion in the 41 years the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey of the views of patients in England, Scotland and Wales has been carried out.
Satisfaction with NHS dentistry has collapsed, too, from 60% as recently as 2019 to just 20% last year. More people (55%) are dissatisfied with dental care than with any other service.
Similarly, fewer than a third (31%) of adults are satisfied with GP services.
“The latest results lay bare the extent of the problems faced by the NHS and the size of the challenge for the government”, said Dan Wellings, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund. “For too many people, the NHS has become too difficult to access. How can you be satisfied with a service you can’t get into?”
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 2 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

CQC tells trust to move care of sick babies

A trust has moved the care of some sick babies out of one of its neonatal units at the Care Quality Commission’s request.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust said babies requiring more than 24 hours of neonatal intensive or high dependency care would now be moved from St James’ University Hospital to the Leeds General Infirmary, which has a neonatal intensive care unit, or alternative hospitals.
The trust confirmed this followed a request from the Care Quality Commission, which carried out unannounced inspections of its maternity and neonatal services in December and January.
Previously St James’ had been providing “less complex elements of intensive care and high dependency care”, despite only having a “special care baby unit” (SCBU), which typically provides care for less seriously ill babies than a NICU.
This unusual position had been agreed with the Yorkshire and Humber neonatal operational delivery unit. The trust said its neonatal doctors and nurses worked across the units in both hospitals, and were qualified and trained to treat babies requiring the highest level of care.
The trust’s maternity services have recently been criticised by a group of parents, and HSJ last week highlighted how they have been rated “red” for high perinatal mortality in the national maternity services audit four times in the past seven years.
Chief nurse Rabina Tindale said: “Individuals are still able to give birth at St James’ Hospital and babies will receive the appropriate level of care in our SCBU, but this [change] does mean that if babies need more than 24 hours of intensive care or high dependency care, they must be transferred to Leeds General Infirmary or another unit.”
Read full story (paywalled)
Source: HSJ, 1 April 2025
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Departing NHSE boss ‘calls out’ A&E variation

NHS England’s outgoing chief operating officer has claimed there is too much unwarranted variation in the service’s emergency care performance.
Dame Emily Lawson made the comment at last week’s NHSE board meeting ahead of her departure from the organisation yesterday.
She told the board that she “wanted to call out variability” in the spread of 12-hour A&E waits across the county.
Dame Emily said: “If we look at the last six months of data, 17.6 per cent of trusts have deteriorated in 12-hour breaches, 25.8 per cent have improved, and the rest have sustained their 12-hour performance.
“When we look at headline numbers, we often miss both the improvement that’s going on, but also some of the tensions that are happening and needing to be managed locally.”
Dame Emily added that emergency care “still has some opportunity” to improve its productivity, adding that long A&E waits for people in mental health crisis “remain too common”.
Read full story (paywalled)
Source: HSJ, 1 April 2025
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India trains thousands of medics to promote vaccine in huge push to end cervical cancer

Tens of thousands of doctors across India are being trained to promote the HPV vaccine, in a push to eliminate cervical cancer in the country.
They will check with mothers attending medical appointments that they intend to vaccinate their daughters, and visit schools and community centres armed with facts and slideshows to counter vaccine disinformation.
One in five cervical cancer cases worldwide occur in India – and the overwhelming majority of those are caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV.
HPV vaccination has become routine practice in many countries and has been available in India privately since 2008, but with low take-up.
Sutapa Biswas, co-founder of the Cancer Foundation of India, said imported vaccines were expensive and people were reluctant to spend money on prevention. Misinformation surrounding deaths during, but unrelated to, an HPV vaccine trial in the country had left it with “baggage”, she said.
However, India has recently started manufacturing its own cervical cancer vaccine, and the government is expected to make it part of the national vaccination programme later this year or early next year.
Last year about 11,000 members of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India (Fogsi) underwent virtual training. About 100 of those trainees have now become the National HPV Faculty and will each train 500 general physicians from the Indian Medical Association over the next six months.
The idea, Biswas said, “is to build confidence”. Training includes practical information on dosages, details of the World Health Organization’s push to eliminate cervical cancer, and advice on how to answer common questions.
The implementation of India’s cervical screening programme had been sluggish, she said. Most cancers are diagnosed late, and most people’s experiences of the disease relate to death.
Many non-specialist doctors “didn’t even know that a cancer could be eliminated and vaccination could be such a gamechanger”, Biswas said.
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 1 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Trump makes sweeping HIV research and grant cuts: ‘Setting us back decades’

The federal government has cancelled dozens of grants to study how to prevent new HIV infections and expand access to care, decimating progress toward eliminating the epidemic in the United States, scientists say.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated at least 145 grants related to researching advancements in HIV care that had been awarded nearly $450m in federal funds. The cuts have been made in phases over the last month.
“The loss of this research could very well result in a resurgence of HIV that becomes more generalized in this country,” said Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School who recently had two of her grants cancelled. “These drastic cuts are rapidly destroying the infrastructure of scientific research in this country and we are going to lose a generation of scientists.”
In 2012, the FDA approved pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an antiviral drug taken once a day that is highly successful at preventing new HIV infections. While the drug has been a powerful tool to contain the virus, inequities remain in accessing those drugs and sustaining a daily treatment. Despite major progress, there are still 30,000 new infections each year in the US.
Many of the terminated HIV-related studies focused on improving access to drugs like PrEP in communities that have higher rates of infections – including trans women and Black men. One of Marcus’s projects was examining whether making PrEP available over the counter would increase the use of the drug in vulnerable communities.
“The research has to focus on the populations that are most affected in order to have an impact and be relevant,” said Marcus.
Yet, this may be the justification for defunding so many HIV-related studies. A termination letter reviewed by the Guardian dated 20 March cited that “so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”
Read full story
Source: The Guardian, 1 April 2025
Patient Safety Learning

Obsolete imaging equipment raises concerns in NI hospitals

A report from the Northern Ireland Audit Office has found that 16% of imaging equipment used in healthcare settings is “effectively obsolete”. 
Comptroller and Auditor General Dorinnia Carville has raised concerns over the “substantial proportion of out-of-date equipment” and a growing gap between demand and capacity.
Northern Ireland’s Department of Health said that while some of the equipment base “would ideally be replaced at a quicker rate”, it remains “safe and fit for purpose”.
The report noted that around 90% of all hospital patients have images taken and interpreted. It said that increasing recognition of the benefits of imaging services has resulted in a “growing demand for them”.
The report added: “Combined with changing patient demographics, and an absence of sustainable funding and resources, capacity has been unable to keep pace.”
The report found that between 2018 and 2024, the health service delivered a total of 350,000 fewer scans (MRI, CT, and non-obstetric ultrasound scans) than what was required to meet demand. Similarly, waiting lists and waiting times for imaging services have risen in that period.
The report said that timely replacement of imaging equipment is one of the “key components to service delivery and quality”.
It said: “Currently 16% of all HSC imaging equipment is over 10 years old and is effectively obsolete. Older equipment can result in increased downtime and maintenance costs. It can also be potentially slower, reducing the number of patients which can be scanned, and may produce lower quality images meaning an increased risk of missed disease.”
Read full story
Source: Medscape, 31 March 2025
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