Jump to content
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    210

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Clive Flashman

Administrators

 Content Type 

News posted by Clive Flashman

  1. Clive Flashman
    NHS People Plan provides a stop-gap but leaves glaring omissions
    'Two years after it was first promised, the NHS is still waiting for a long-term workforce plan. Some of the measures announced in today’s People Plan are positive. As the plan acknowledges, it is important to learn from the impressive changes made by NHS staff during the pandemic. And improving support for people from black and minority ethnic communities – who make up one fifth of the NHS workforce – is rightly a top priority. 
    'But there are glaring omissions. The NHS went into the pandemic with a workforce gap of around 100,000 staff, yet the plan does not say how this will be addressed in the medium term. This is particularly concerning at a time when our recruitment of nurses from abroad has dropped dramatically. These details are missing because the NHS is still waiting on government to set out what funding will be available to expand the NHS workforce – without which the NHS cannot recruit and retain the doctors, nurses and other staff it needs. 
    'While this plan at least provides a stop-gap to help get the NHS through the winter, there is no equivalent plan for social care – a sector suffering from decades of political neglect and the devastating impact of COVID-19 on care users and staff. A comprehensive workforce plan for both the NHS and social care is needed now more than ever'.
  2. Clive Flashman
    Hospital trust ‘truly sorry that mistakes were made in care’ of Luchii Gavrilescu, who died after being sent home from hospital with undiagnosed tuberculosis.
    An NHS trust investigated over maternity care failings has apologised after a six-week-old child was found to have died due to mistakes at one of its hospitals.
    East Kent Hospitals University Trust was embroiled in a major scandal after The Independent revealed the trust had seen more than 130 babies over a four-year period suffer brain damage as a result of being starved of oxygen during birth. A report into the trust concluded in April that there had been “recurrent safety risks” at its maternity units.
    Read full article here.
  3. Clive Flashman
    Health and social care secretary Matt Hancock delivered a ‘future of healthcare’ speech to the Royal College of Physicians on Thursday and laid out seven lessons from the health and care response to Covid-19 that he wants to see retained. If followed through, some of his points would mark significant shifts in policy and Conservative thinking. However, Hancock said it was important to “build better” in the way that London was built better after the Great Fire in 1666.

    Hancock’s seven points were: the NHS must value people and ‘bust bureaucracy’ that gets in their way; the future is “collaboration not competition”; “better technology means better healthcare”; the NHS must be open to other sectors; planning and funding will be “system first”; and social care and public health need more attention. On tech, Hancock said consultations will be digital first, and there will be a new focus on interoperability and data sharing.
  4. Clive Flashman
    More than one in five GP partners said they removed practice staff away from face-to-face care due to ethnicity during the pandemic, a Pulse survey has revealed. 
    The survey in June revealed that 84 of the 378 respondents said that ‘ethnicity was a crucial factor in removing anyone in your practice away from face-to-face assessments’.
    Around 70% of respondents said they had been counting ethnicity as a factor when risk assessing staff.
    See full article here
  5. Clive Flashman
    All GP appointments should be done remotely by default unless a patient needs to be seen in person, Matt Hancock has said, prompting doctors to warn of the risk of abandoning face-to-face consultations.
    In a speech setting out lessons for the NHS and care sector from the coronavirus pandemic, the health secretary claimed that while some errors were made, “so many things went right” in the response to Covid-19, and new ways of working should continue. He said it was patronising to claim that older patients were not able to handle technology.
    The plan for web-based GP appointments is set to become formal policy, and follows guidance already sent to GPs on having more online consultations. But the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) hit back, saying it would oppose a predominantly online system on the grounds that both doctors and patients benefited from proper contact.
    Read full article here
  6. Clive Flashman
    This week, Public Health England (PHE) Chief Executive's message covers the social care sector's management of COVID-19 outbreaks and the exemplary work in Hammersmith and Fulham Council, PHE's Better Health campaign, new reports on greenspaces and global disaster risk reduction, and our studies to support musicians and artists during the pandemic.
    Read full article here.
  7. Clive Flashman
    "We are the NHS: People Plan 2020/21 – action for us all, along with Our People Promise, sets out what our NHS people can expect from their leaders and from each other.  It builds on the creativity and drive shown by our NHS people in their response, to date, to the COVID-19 pandemic and the interim NHS People Plan. It focuses on how we must all continue to look after each other and foster a culture of inclusion and belonging, as well as take action to grow our workforce, train our people, and work together differently to deliver patient care.
    This plan sets out practical actions for employers and systems, as well as the actions that NHS England and NHS Improvement and Health Education England will take, over the remainder of 2020/21. It includes specific commitments around:
    Looking after our people – with quality health and wellbeing support for everyone Belonging in the NHS – with a particular focus on tackling the discrimination that some staff face New ways of working and delivering care – making effective use of the full range of our people’s skills and experience Growing for the future – how we recruit and keep our people, and welcome back colleagues who want to return The arrival of COVID-19 acted as a springboard, bringing about an incredible scale and pace of transformation, and highlighting the enormous contribution of all our NHS people. The NHS must build on this momentum and continue to transform – keeping people at the heart of all we do."
  8. Clive Flashman
    The redeployment of health visitors to support the national coronavirus response has left remaining staff with increased workloads, worsened mental health and fears that the needs of children are being missed, a new survey has revealed.
    In the wake of Covid-19, University College London (UCL) gathered the views of 663 health visitors in England to find out how the pandemic had affected their work. Overall, 60% of respondents reported that at least one member of their team had been redeployed between 19 March and 3 June. Of teams that had lost staff, 41% reported that between six and 50 colleagues had been moved elsewhere during that period.
    The combination of increased caseloads and limited face-to-face contacts left “widespread concern” among health visitors that the needs of many children would be missed in the peak of the outbreak, found the survey. Study authors raised concerns about the “significant negative impacts” that increased workload and pressures had on staff wellbeing and mental health.
    Read the full article here.
  9. Clive Flashman
    Leeds Teaching Hospitals has launched a support fund for patients, their relatives and volunteers who may be struggling financially due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    The fund is intended to assist (but is not limited to):
    Bereaved relatives facing immediate financial pressures until their personal financial affairs are sorted eg having weekly bills to meet and no immediate access to bank accounts Patients isolating for 14 days in advance of admission to hospital and suffering income loss, excess cost or other financial hardship as a result Patients, their immediate families or volunteers who have experienced significant household income loss as a result of the pandemic and are struggling with financial obligations Those experiencing significant increases in costs as a direct result of the pandemic, eg increased childcare costs Read the full article here
  10. Clive Flashman
    Initial data from the COVID-19 Infection Survey. This survey is being delivered in partnership with IQVIA, Oxford University and UK Biocentre.
    Full article here
    Table of contents in the report:
     
    1.       Main points
    2.       Number of people in England who had COVID-19
    3.       Regional analysis
    4.       Incidence rate
    5.       Test sensitivity and specificity
    6.       COVID-19 Infection Survey data
    7.       Collaboration
    8.       Glossary
    9.       Measuring the data
    10.    Strengths and limitations
    11.     Related links
  11. Clive Flashman
    People are being warned to familiarise themselves with the symptoms of sepsis after a study found that as many as 20,000 COVID-19 survivors could be diagnosed with the condition within a year.
    One in five people who receive hospital treatment for the coronavirus are at risk, according to the UK Sepsis Trust.
    Sepsis is triggered when the body overreacts to an infection, causing the immune system to turn on itself - leading to tissue damage, organ failure and potentially death. If spotted quickly, it can be treated with antibiotics before it turns into septic shock and damages vital organs.
    Read the full article here.
  12. Clive Flashman
    Antibiotic resistance is an increasing challenge for modern medicine as more naturally occurring antimicrobials are needed to tackle infections capable of resisting treatments currently in use.
    New research from the University of Warwick has investigated natural remedies to fill the gap in the antibiotic market, taking their cue from a 1,000-year-old text known as Bald's Leechbook. Read the full article here.
  13. Clive Flashman
    A dedicated team of 32 volunteers are hitting the roads across North Wales assisting the Welsh Ambulance Service in dealing with fallers.
    Based out of the Ambulance headquarters in St Asaph, the Community First Responder Falls Team was launched on 30 April this year and has already assisted almost 250 people.
    The team was created to use the talents and experience of the familiar Community First Responders (CFRs) who had to be stood down from their normal duties at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
    Read the full article here.
  14. Clive Flashman
    Lego could be used as a practical tool to train doctors in anesthetic skills according to new research that has shown a simple task using the building bricks can help improve technical skills—a finding that could improve medical training and patient safety.
    Scientists from the University of Nottingham's School of Psychology and School of Medicine developed a task where people copied shapes using bricks that they could see in a mirror. They found this simple training improved student performance in an ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia task. The results of the study have been published in British Journal of Anesthesia
    Read the full article here
  15. Clive Flashman
    In the largest independent randomized controlled trial (RCT) of its type, a multimodal digital therapy program for patients with non-specific chronic low back pain has outperformed standard-of-care treatment across all medical outcomes.
    Results of the study, published in the Journal of Pain Research, show that patients using Kaia, the back pain management app developed by leading digital therapeutics company Kaia Health, reduced pain levels, anxiety, depression, stress, and improved wellbeing and body functionality significantly more compared to standard-of-care treatments, e.g. pain killers, surgeries, physical therapy.
    “This large-scale study demonstrates the significant benefits for people managing low back pain when using Kaia to deliver a multimodal treatment through a digital device, such as a smartphone,” says Thomas R. Toelle, M.D., Ph.D., Head of the Pain Center of the Technical University Munich, Germany. “These results add to the growing body of medical evidence that supports the use of digital multimodal treatments for chronic conditions, such as back pain.”
    Low back pain is one of the leading causes of global disability, with an enormous cost for healthcare systems worldwide. 1,2 According to a 2018 report on the impact of musculoskeletal pain on employers, chronic pain, including back pain, accounts for 188.7 million lost work days, and $62,4 billion in lost productivity cost.3
    Kaia is an app-based, multimodal digital therapy program for chronic back pain, which focuses on Physical therapy, Relaxation exercises, and Medical education.
  17. Clive Flashman
    One of the world’s foremost virus experts has said survivors will be living with the effects of Covid-19 for “years to come” after he was struck down by a severe infection, and called for added support for those who have recovered from the disease. 
    Professor Peter Piot, who as director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has been at the forefront of the academic response to the pandemic, has spent his entire career studying viruses such as Ebola and HIV. 
    Prof Piot spent a week at the Royal Free Hospital in London in early April after contracting the disease. “I spent a week in isolation on a ward with three other men. I couldn’t leave the room. When I came out the thing I remember most is seeing the sky. London was deserted - it was in acute lockdown,” he said.
    The fever and splitting headache he had felt before being admitted were gone and apart from chronic exhaustion he was feeling better, he said. Getting out of bed was a struggle and he had to take rests when going up the many flights of stairs of his tall Georgian townhouse. But a week later he took a turn for the worse - he became breathless and his heart rate shot up to over 100. 
    Read the full article here
  18. Clive Flashman
    A new report has highlighted how point-of-care scanning in the NHS can help to improve patient safety, saving the NHS millions of pounds.
    Six NHS hospital trusts which implemented regular point-of-care scanning have ensured complete traceability of healthcare items to help improve patient safety while securing millions of pounds of savings and releasing thousands of hours of clinical time, a new report reveals.
    ‘A scan of the benefits: the Scan4Safety evidence report’ details the results at hospital trusts that took part in a national two-year programme, known as Scan4Safety, to investigate the benefits of point-of-care barcode scanning in the NHS.
    Full article here
    We wonder if @Richard Price might like to post more about what the impact of Scan4safety has been at University Hospitals Plymouth. Perhaps here:
    https://www.pslhub.org/learn/commissioning-service-provision-and-innovation-in-health-and-care/digital-health-and-care-service-provision/other-health-and-care-software/ 
  19. Clive Flashman
    A national investigation has been launched into the equipment used by NHS staff to monitor babies heart rates during labour because of concerns they could be contributing to deaths and disabilities.
    The independent Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB), which investigates systemic safety risks in the NHS, has opened an inquiry after reviewing hundreds of maternity incidents.
    It found equipment used to record cardiotocographic (CTG) traces were linked to 138 maternity investigations since 2018 with more than 238 separate findings referencing the use of CTG as a factor in the error.
    Read the full article here
  20. Clive Flashman
    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged last week that a significant number of COVID-19 patients do not recover quickly, and instead experience ongoing symptoms, such as fatigue and cough.
    As many as a third of patients who were never sick enough to be hospitalized are not back to their usual health up to three weeks after their diagnosis, the report found.
    Read the full article here
  21. Clive Flashman
    The safety of maternity services in the NHS are to be investigated by MPs after a string of scandals involving the deaths of mothers and babies highlighted by The Independent.
    The Commons health select committee, chaired by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, has announced it will hold an inquiry looking at why maternity incidents keep re-occurring and what needs to be done to improve safety.
    The committee will also examine whether the clinical negligence process needs to change and the wider aspects of a “blame culture” in the health service and its affects on medical advice and decision making.
    Read the full article here
  22. Clive Flashman
    Looking to improve practice through learning
    Errors, mishaps and misunderstandings are surprisingly common in medicine and around one in 10 patients suffer avoidable harm, impacting on patients, their families, health care organisations, staff and students. However a research project seeking to improve patient safety across Europe, led by Newcastle-based Northumbria University, has received international acclaim as it looks to improve practice through learning.
    The SLIPPS (Shared Learning from Practice to improve Patient Safety) project is Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, and is led by Professor Alison Steven, a Reader in Health Professions Education at Northumbria University.  Professor Steven has a longstanding interest in the use of education to raise standards of care and ensure patient safety. Considering the rapid spread of Covid 19, she says improving patient safety and standards of care across Europe and beyond, has never been more important.
    Read full article here
  23. Clive Flashman
    Most people in England, about 30 million, are to be offered a free flu vaccine this year, the government says.
    It is to prepare for a winter that could see the annual flu season coincide with a surge in coronavirus.
    The traditional flu programme will include all over-50s for the first time, as well anyone on the shielding list and the people they live with.
    Also for the first time, children in their first year of secondary school will all be offered the vaccine.
    Plans for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have not yet been announced.
    Read full article here
  24. Clive Flashman
    To help stop the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the majority of hospitals have stopped or severely restricted visits. This article explains how you can still help a loved one even when you can't see them face to face.
    During the coronavirus crisis, most hospitals and care homes in the UK have stopped visits. If you have a loved one in a healthcare setting, not being able to go to see them will be incredibly difficult. But these temporary measures have not been taken lightly. Restricting visits to hospitals and care homes is important to reduce the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 as much as possible. This way hospital and care home residents, and healthcare staff, can be better protected during the pandemic.
    Read the full article here
  25. Clive Flashman
    Initial survey findings show the long road to recovery for people who have faced COVID at home without going into hospital
    New survey findings from over 1,000 people show that those recovering from mild-moderate COVID are struggling for weeks with symptoms, raising concerns that there is not adequate support for people who have not been in hospital with the illness.
    The ongoing survey is being run by Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation, through their post-COVID HUB, which they set up, alongside a helpline and WhatsApp service, to support anyone left with breathing difficulties after COVID.
    Read full article here
×
×
  • Create New...