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Sam

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  1. Sam
    A fourth suspected suicide has occurred at a mental health trust which was recently warned by the Care Quality Commission after three other similar inpatient deaths in quick succession, HSJ can reveal.
    All four deaths at Devon Partnership Trust had common themes, including the use of ligatures, and occurred amid a year-long delay to the trust’s plan to reduce ligature risks.
    Figures obtained by HSJ under freedom of information laws also reveal the trust took nearly a year to investigate the first two deaths. The target is 90 days.
    The trust told HSJ it had faced “humongous” problems addressing ligature risks and had been too “patient” with another trust which was helping to investigate the deaths.
    Read full story (paywallled)
    Source HSJ, 27 October 2020
  2. Sam
    An independent review found that commissioners’ investigation of a young boy’s death was ‘mismanaged’, and heard allegations that the person who coordinated it was bullied over the contents.  
    The independent review, commissioned by NHS England, has published its final report following an investigation into Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire clinical commissioning group’s LeDer review into the death of Oliver McGowan.
    Chaired by Fiona Ritchie, the independent review was commissioned last year after evidence emerged that the CCG had rewritten earlier findings of the review, removing suggestions his death at North Bristol Trust in 2016 was avoidable.
    Oliver died in November 2016 after being given anti-psychotic medication against his own and his parents’ wishes and despite medical records showing he had an intolerance to anti-psychotics. He developed severe brain swelling because of the drugs and died.A local LeDer review — part of a programme aimed at improving care based on deaths among people with learning disabilities — was launched in 2017, seven months after his death, by the CCG (then operating as three separate organisations), then published in 2018. 
    In 2018, a coroner concluded Oliver’s care prior to his death was “appropriate” and made no recommendations. His death is also currently the subject of a police investigation. 
    The lead reviewer (Ms A) stated in her panel interview that during the time she was undertaking this LeDeR she had felt bullied, overworked and overly stressed by the demands placed on her by the various correspondences with solicitors and her line management. The fact that Ms A believed she was isolated and unsupported during this review illustrates evident failures in the CCG assurance and management processes at the time.
    In a final report by the subsequent independent review, published today, the panel led by Ms Ritchie “unanimously” agreed Oliver’s death was “potentially avoidable”.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source HSJ, 20 October 2020
  3. Sam
    Research by a group of doctors has found ‘major deficiencies’ around infection control within hospitals in the North West region.
    The study looked at trusts’ adherence to Public Health England guidance around limiting the spread of COVID-19 within orthopaedic services.
    The study found patients were routinely being allocated to hospital beds before they had been confirmed as covid-negative, “thus allowing spread of COVID-19 not only between patients but also between nursing and medical staff”.
    Fewer than half of patients were nursed with the appropriate screens in place, while it was uncommon for doctors to be tested regularly.
    Separate statistics published by NHS England suggest almost 20 per cent of new covid cases in North West hospitals from August to December were likely to be nosocomial, meaning they were acquired on the wards.
    This was a higher proportion than any other region.
    Read full story
    Source: HSJ (paywalled), 16 December 2020
  5. Sam
    In April, when the coronavirus outbreak was at its peak in the UK and tearing through hospitals, junior doctor Rebecca Thornton’s mental health took a turn for the worse and she ended up having to be sectioned.
    Even now, three months later, she cannot face going back to her job and thinks it will take her a year to recover from some of the horrors she saw while working on a Covid ward in a deprived area of London.
    “It was horrendous,” Thornton recalls. “It’s so harrowing to watch people die, day in, day out. Every time someone passed away, I’d say, ‘This is my fault’. Eventually I stopped eating and sleeping.”
    Thornton’s case may sound extreme but her experiences of working through Covid are far from unique. More than 1,000 doctors plan to quit the NHS over the government’s handling of the pandemic, according to a recent survey, with some citing burnout as a cause.
    A psychologist offering services to NHS staff throughout the UK, who asked to remain anonymous, has witnessed the toll on staff. “I’ve seen signs of PTSD in some healthcare workers,” she says. “Staff really stood up to the plate and worked incredibly hard. It was a crisis situation that moved very quickly ... After it subsided a little bit, the tiredness became very clear.”
    Roisin Fitzsimons, who is head of the Nightingale Academy, which provides a platform to share best practice in nursing and midwifery, and consultant nurse at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust, also worries about the looming threat of an uncertain future. “Are our staff prepared? Do they have the resilience to go through this again? That’s the worry and that’s the unknown. Burnout is hitting people now. People are processing and realising what they’ve gone through.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 8 September 2020
  6. Sam
    Hundreds of thousands who survived the virus still have side-effects that range from loss of smell to chronic fatigue.
    "It started with a mild sore throat. I was in Devon at the beginning of the lockdown, and because I hadn’t been on a cruise ship, gone skiing in Italy or partying with the crowds at Cheltenham races, I didn’t think it could be COVID-19. Then I developed sinusitis. My GP was practical: “This is not a symptom of the virus,” he emailed me. But my sense of smell had disappeared. At first this wasn’t a sign but six months later, I still can’t tell the difference between the smell of an overripe banana or lavender. I can distinguish petrol but not gas, dog mess but not roses, bacon but not freshly cut grass. Everything else smells of burnt condensed milk."
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: The Times, 23 September 2020
  7. Sam
    A hospital boss championed by Matt Hancock has been told to end “a toxic management culture” after doctors were asked to provide fingerprint samples to identify a whistleblower.
    The Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA) has urged the chief executive of West Suffolk hospital, Steve Dunn, who Hancock described as an “outstanding leader”, to take urgent action to improve the wellbeing of senior clinicians and “thereby the safety of patients”.
    In a strongly worded letter sent to Dunn in July, seen by the Guardian, the RCoA president, Prof Ravi Mahajan, reminded him that “undermining and bullying behaviour is unacceptable”.
    Following a three-day review of the hospital, Prof Mahajan’s letter said senior anaesthetists had complained about a “toxic management culture that risks impairing their ability to care safely for patients”.
    The incident, and other failings in patient safety, contributed to the hospital becoming the first ever to be relegated by Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors from “outstanding” to “requires improvement” in January.
    A spokesman for the trust said: “Ensuring our colleagues work in a supportive, safe environment is good for our staff and means better patient care, which is why we have done extensive work this year to act on feedback about our working culture, including taking action to address the concerns raised by the Royal College of Anaesthetists.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 11 September 2020
  8. Sam
    A leaked government report suggests a "reasonable worst case scenario" of 85,000 deaths across the UK this winter due to COVID-19.
    The document also says while more restrictions could be re-introduced, schools would likely remain open.
    But it says the report "is a scenario, not a prediction" and the data are subject to "significant uncertainty".
    However some are critical of the modelling and say some of it is already out of date.
    The document, which has been seen by BBC Newsnight, was prepared for the government by the Sage scientific advisory group, which aims to help the NHS and local authorities plan services, such as mortuaries and burial services, for the winter months ahead.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 29 August 2020
  9. Sam
    The Patient Safety Learning Awards 2019 are here!
    The Patient Safety Learning Awards publicly acknowledge and celebrate important work in patient safety, while sharing learning and successes to improve patient safety. This year, our Awards are inspired by our latest report, A Blueprint for Action. A Blueprint for Action sets out actions needed to progress towards a patient-safe future. These address six foundations of safer care for patients - one of these foundations is shared learning.
    The Awards this year have six different categories, based on our foundations for safer care:
    shared learning for patient safety leadership for patient safety professionalising patient safety patient engagement for patient safety data and insight for patient safety patient safety culture. A seventh award, the Patient Safety Learning Award, will be made to the individual, team or organisation who our judges believe has gone above and beyond. Each winning entry will receive a cash prize to enable them to visit another team or organisation to learn more about patient safety. As well as this prize, winners will receive two complimentary tickets to our annual conference, awards and drinks reception, held in London on 2 October 2019.
    Enter now
    The deadline for entries is midnight on Friday 30 August.
  10. Sam
    "I still have nightmares most nights about being completely out of my depth."
    Gemma, a ward nurse in Northern Ireland, was redeployed to a critical care unit at the end of March when the first wave of coronavirus struck.
    "I had never looked after a critically ill intensive care patient in my life," she says.
    "I just thought, I'm coming in here and I'm going to die. I'm going to catch Covid and I'm going to be one of those patients in the beds."
    As the second wave of the pandemic takes deep root across parts of the UK, thousands of NHS workers are struggling to recover from what they have already been through.
    "We were all in PPE all the time," recalls Nathan, a senior intensive care nurse at a hospital in the Midlands. "All you can see is people's eyes, you can't see anything else."
    He describes trying to help junior members of staff survive long and difficult days.
    "And I'd see these eyes as big as saucers saying help me, do something. Make this right. Fix this."
    "The pressure was insane, and the anxiety just got me," he says. "I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't eat, I was sick before work, I was shaking before I got into my car in the morning."
    Nathan ended up having time off with severe anxiety, but he is now back at the hospital, waiting for the beds to fill up again.
    The BBC has spoken to a number of nurses and doctors across the UK who are deeply apprehensive about what lies ahead this winter.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 24 October 2020
  11. Sam
    Accidents on maternity wards cost the NHS nearly £1 billion last year, Jeremy Hunt, the chairman of the Commons health committee, has revealed.
    The former health secretary said the bill for maternity legal action was nearly twice the amount spent on maternity doctors in England. It was part of the NHS’s £2.4 billion total legal fees and compensation bill, up £137 million on the previous year.
    Mr Hunt has also told the Daily Mail there is evidence that hospitals are failing to provide details of avoidable deaths despite being ordered to do so three years ago as he highlighted “appalling high” figures which showed that up to 150 lives are being lost needlessly every week in public hospitals.
    Responding to the figures, Mr Hunt said: "Something has gone badly wrong."
    In 2017, he told trusts to publish data on the number of avoidable deaths among patients in their care. But freedom of information responses from 59 hospital trusts, about half the total, found less than a quarter gave meaningful data on avoidable deaths.
    Mr Hunt cited “major cultural challenges” which he blamed for preventing doctors and nurses from accepting any blame. He blamed lawyers who get involved “almost immediately” once something goes wrong with a patient’s care.
    “Doctors, nurses and midwives worry they could lose their licence if they are found to have made a mistake. Hospital managers worry about the reputation of their organisation,” he added.
    Mr Hunt said: “We have appallingly high levels of avoidable harm and death in our healthcare system. We seem to just accept it as inevitable.”
    An NHS spokesman said: “Delivering the safest possible health service for patients is a priority, and the national policy on learning from deaths is clear that hospitals must publish this information every three months, as well as an annual summary, so that they are clear about any problems that have been identified and how they are being addressed.
    Read full story
    Source: The Telegraph, 18 September 2020
  12. Sam
    A trust is investigating after two junior doctors developed covid following an offsite event attended by 22 juniors where social distancing rules were allegedly ignored.
    The cases, involving doctors from the Royal Surrey Foundation Trust in Guildford, have been declared an outbreak by Public Health England and police have investigated the incident.
    But HSJ understands that contact tracing has concluded no patients needed to be tested because staff had worn appropriate PPE at all times and those involved had swiftly self-isolated once they realised they might have covid or had been at risk of exposure to it.
    It is not known whether any of the doctors had returned to work after the event before realising they might have been exposed to covid.
    Dr Mark Evans, deputy medical director, said: “Protecting our patients is our priority and we are committed to ensuring that all of our staff follow government guidance. This incident took place outside of work and has been reported appropriately, and there was no disruption to our services for patients.”
    Read full story
    Source: HSJ, 22 October 2020
  13. Sam
    Covid has brought many hidden tragedies: elderly residents in care homes bereft of family visits, families in quarantine missing loved one’s funerals, and mums forced to go through labour alone. 
    Much of this has been necessary, however painful, but Jeremy Hunt fears we’re getting the balance badly wrong in maternity care. That’s why he is backing The Mail on Sunday’s campaign to end lone births, which has been championed in Parliament by Alicia Kearns.
    Infection control in hospitals is critically important, but mothers’ mental health can’t be pushed down the priority list. 
    Imagine the agony of a new mum sent for a scan on her own, only to be told that her much longed-for baby has no heartbeat. Or the woman labouring in agony for hours who is told she is not yet sufficiently dilated to merit her partner joining her for moral support.
    "I have heard some truly heartbreaking stories, which quite frankly should have no place in a modern, compassionate health service. One woman who gave birth to a stillborn baby alone at 41 weeks; another woman who was left alone after surgery due to a miscarriage at 12 weeks," says Jeremy.
    Perhaps most concerningly of all, there are reports of partners being asked to leave their new babies and often traumatised mothers almost immediately after birth. That means they miss out on vital bonding time and mums lose crucial support to help them recover mentally and physically, in some cases with partners not allowed back to meet their new child properly for several days.
    "This is a question of basic compassion and decency – the very values that the NHS embodies and the reason we’re all so proud of our universal health service – so we need every hospital to commit to urgent action without delay."
    Read full story
    Source: MailOnline, 19 September 2020
  14. Sam
    Greater NHS support is needed for people chronically ill for months with COVID-19 symptoms, experts have told BBC Radio 4's File on 4.
    The Royal College of GPs is calling for a national network of "post-Covid" clinics to help such people. But less than 12% of 86 NHS care commissioning groups asked by the BBC said they were running such services.
    NHS England said it was "rapidly expanding new and strengthened rehab centres".
    Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London and leader of the Covid Symptom Study app, said around 300,000 people in the UK have reported symptoms lasting for more than a month - so called "long Covid".
    He added that data from the app showed around 60,000 people have been ill for more than three months. However, many of these people may not have been tested for Covid.
    The government moved away from community testing on 12 March, instead only testing those admitted to hospital. That meant people who recovered from suspected coronavirus at home were unable to access tests.
    Elly MacDonald, 37, from Surbiton, was training for the London Marathon when she first developed what she believes were Covid symptoms on 21 March. More than five months on, she still suffers from breathlessness and extreme fatigue, but has not received a positive test result - because community testing was re-introduced too late for it to detect her illness.
    She changed her GP practice after initially feeling she was not being helped. Elly said: "Just knowing that I actually have people who are taking me seriously - that's been very important for my recovery. I just want my life back."
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 8 September 2020
  15. Sam
    Health chiefs are designing an “early warning” system to detect and prevent future maternity care scandals before they happen, a health minister has said.
    Patient safety minister Nadine Dorries said she hoped the system would highlight hospitals and maternity units where mistakes were being made earlier.
    The former nurse also revealed the Department of Health and Social Care was drawing up a plan for a joint national curriculum for both midwives and obstetricians to make sure they had the skills to look after women safely.
    During a Parliamentary debate following the publication of a report into the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital care scandal, the minister was challenged by MPs to take action to prevent future scandals.
    The former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, warned the failings at the Shropshire trust, where dozens of babies died or were left with permanent brain damage, could be repeated elsewhere.
    He said: “The biggest mistake in interpreting this report would be to think that what happened at Shrewsbury and Telford is a one-off — it may well not be, and we mustn't assume that it is.”
    Ms Dorries said: “Every woman should own her birth plan, be in control of what is happening to her during her delivery and I really hope ... this report is fundamental in how it's going to reform the maternity services across the UK going forward.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 11 December 2020
  16. Sam
    Younger people who think they are “invincible” need to be aware of the shocking life-changing reality of long Covid, according to health professionals who are living with the condition.
    Long Covid, also known as post-Covid syndrome, is used to describe the effects of COVID-19 that continue for weeks or months beyond the initial illness.
    Speaking at the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Coronavirus, Dr Nathalie MacDermott, 38, said neurologists believe Covid has damaged her spinal cord and she can only walk about 200 metres without some form of assistance.
    She said the damage has affected her bladder and bowel too, causing urinary tract infections, and she gets pain in her arms and has weakness in her grip.
    Dr MacDermott, a clinical doctor sub-specialising in paediatric infectious diseases in the NHS, told MPs there needs to be “better recognition” from employers that long Covid is a “genuine condition” and that people may need to be off work for a significant period of time.
    She added: “And I think we need better recognition in the public, particularly the younger public who think that they’re invincible.
    “I’m 38 and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to walk properly without crutches again. Will this continue to get worse? Will I end up in a wheelchair?”
    Read full story
    Source: 12 January 2021, Lancashire Post
  17. Sam
    The family of a senior medic and lifelong NHS campaigner have called for an investigation into his death as it took paramedics more than half an hour to arrive at his home after operators were told he was suffering a cardiac arrest.
    Professor Kailash Chand, a former British Medical Association deputy chair, had complained of chest pains before one of his neighbours, a consultant anaesthetist at Manchester Royal Infirmary, called 111 for help before telling the call handler within three minutes that he believed his friend was having a cardiac arrest.
    “I was answering their questions when Kailash’s eyes began rolling and he slipped into unconsciousness. That’s when I said ‘this looks like a cardiac arrest’ and to upgrade the call. They kept asking questions as I started CPR and asked for an urgent ambulance. That was two or two and a half minutes into the call."
    Evidence seen by i News shows that it took another 30 minutes after the neighbour told the operator about the cardiac arrest for the paramedics to arrive at Professor Chand’s flat in Didsbury, Greater Manchester.
    National standards for ambulance trusts show that ambulance trusts must respond to category 1 calls – those that are classified as life-threatening and needing immediate intervention and/or resuscitation, such as cardiac or respiratory arrest – in 7 minutes on average, and respond to 90% of Category 1 calls in 15 minutes.
    Read full story
    Source: iNews, 3 September 2021
  18. Sam
    Families of people with dementia have said there is a national crisis in care safety as it emerged that more than half of residential homes reported on by inspectors this year were rated “inadequate” or requiring improvement – up from less than a third pre-pandemic.
    Serious and often shocking failings uncovered in previously “good” homes in recent months include people left in bed “for months”, pain medicine not being administered, violence between residents and malnutrition – including one person who didn’t eat for a month.
    In homes in England where standards have slumped from “good” to “inadequate”, residents’ dressings went unchanged for 20 days, there were “revolting” filthy carpets, “unexplained and unwitnessed wounds” and equipment was ”encrusted with dirt”, inspectors’ reports showed.
    Nearly one in 10 care homes in England that offer dementia support reported on by Care Quality Commission inspectors in 2022 were given the very worst rating – more than three times the ratio in 2019, according to Guardian analysis.
    Read full story
    Source: 29 December 2022
     
  19. Sam
    At least seven so-called NHS “never events” should be reclassified because the health service has failed to put in place effective measures to stop them from repeatedly happening, safety experts have said.
    The independent Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) said NHS England should remove the never event incidents from the list of 15 it requires hospitals to report, because they are not “wholly preventable” and the NHS has not adequately recognised the systemic risks that mean they keep happening.
    The errors include examples such as a 62-year-old man having the wrong hip replaced during surgery and a nine-year-old girl who was given a drug by injection that should have been given by mouth.
    Other incidents included a woman who had a vaginal swab left inside her following the birth of her first child and a 26-year-old man who had a feeding tube accidentally inserted into his lung rather than his stomach.
    In a new report, investigators from HSIB carried out a detailed analysis of seven incidents it has investigated which account for the majority of never events recorded by NHS hospitals in 2018-19.
    NHS England claims there are steps hospitals can take that mean the errors should never happen but HSIB says many of the steps are administrative, such as a checklist, and do not fully take into account the environment staff work in, the nature of the errors or how they happen.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 21 January 2021
  20. Sam
    An ambulance service could be put in special measures after a damning report criticised poor leadership for fostering bullying and not acting decisively on allegations of predatory sexual behaviour towards patients.
    East of England Ambulance Service Trust failed to protect patients and staff from sexual abuse, inappropriate behaviour and harassment, the Care Quality Commission said.
    It failed to support the mental health and wellbeing of staff, with high levels of bullying and harassment. Staff who raised concerns were not treated with respect and some senior leaders adopted a “combative and defensive approach” which stopped staff speaking out.
    “The leadership, governance and culture still did not support delivery of high-quality care,” the CQC said.
    Read full story (paywalled) 
    Source: HSJ, 30 September 2020
  21. Sam
    An investigation into the outbreak of a bacterial infection that killed 15 people has found there were several “missed opportunities” in their care.
    Mid Essex Clinical Commissioning Group has released the outcome of a 10-month investigation into a Strep A outbreak in 2019, which killed 15 people and affected a further 24. The final report was critical of Provide, a community interest company based in Colchester, as well as the former Mid Essex Hospital Services Trust (now part of Mid and South Essex Foundation Trust).
    It said: “This investigation has identified that in some cases there were missed opportunities where treatment should have been more proactive, holistic and timely. These do not definitively indicate that their outcomes would have been different.”
    Investigators found that 13 of the 15 people that died had received poor wound care from Provide CIC. They reported that inappropriate wound dressings were used and record keeping was so poor that deterioration of wounds was not recognised.
    Even wounds that had not improved over 22 days were not escalated to senior team members for help or referred to the tissue viability service for specialist advice, with investigators told this was often due to concerns over team capacity.
    The report, commissioned by the CCG and conducted by consultancy firm Facere Melius, said: “[Some] individuals became increasingly unwell over a period of time in the community, yet their deterioration either went unnoticed or was not acted upon promptly. Sometimes their condition had become so serious that they were very ill before acute medical intervention was sought”.
    Other findings included delays in the community in the taking of wound swabs to determine if the wound was infected and by which bacteria. It said in one case nine days elapsed before the requested swab took place. Even after Public Health England asked for all wounds to be swabbed following the initial outbreak, this was only conducted on a single patient.
    In other cases there were delays in patients being given antibiotics and this “could have had an adverse impact on the treatment for infection”.
    It also found that sepsis guidelines were not accurately followed, wounds were not uncovered for inspection in A&E, and some patients were given penicillin-based antibiotics despite penicillin allergies being listed in their health records.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 17 September 2020
  22. Sam
    Devices which measure blood oxygen levels could be giving “seriously misleading” results for Black and minority ethnic people, possibly contributing to increased Covid-19 mortality, experts have warned.
    Pulse oximeters attach a clip-like device to a person’s finger, toe or earlobe and send a beam of infrared light to measure oxygen levels in the blood.
    The resulting reading can be used to monitor oxygen levels of people with a variety of conditions, including by people at home with coronavirus, and to assess patients in hospital.
    At the moment, coronavirus patients who call an ambulance but are not yet deemed sick enough to go to hospital are being given new home oxygen monitoring kits to help spot those who may deteriorate earlier, and over 300,000 oximeters have been sent out by NHS England.
    But a new paper cites a “growing body of evidence” that pulse oximetry is less accurate in darker skinned patients.
    This could be contributing to health inequalities such as the increased COVID-19 mortality rates of ethnic minority patients, according to a review conducted for the NHS Race and Health Observatory.
    It is now calling for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to urgently review pulse oximetry products for ethnic minority people used in hospitals and by the wider public.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 27 March 2021
  23. Sam
    Leading charities have spoken out against the government’s scrapping of COVID-19 measures warning that clinically vulnerable people have been made “collateral damage for political considerations.”
    Those representing thousands of clinically vulnerable people have warned the government’s decisions to scrap COVID-19 restrictions leaves people “marginalised” and warned there was a risk to 5-11 year old vulnerable children who are yet to be vaccinated.
    The removal of COVID-19 restrictions next week will mean masks are no longer mandatory and the government will no longer ask people to work from home. Blood Cancer UK has called for the government to do more to support immunocompromised people such as giving them priority testing.
    Alzheimer's Society has said it is too early to drop basic measures, such as mask wearing, which help protect vulnerable members of society.
    Charlotte Augst, chief executive for the charity National Voices said clinically vulnerable people had now become “collateral damage in political considerations.”
    She said: “The pandemic has obviously been difficult for everyone, but it’s been the most difficult for people who are vulnerable to the virus, and some of these people have never really come out of 22 months of lockdowns.
    “There are obviously infection control measures that are harmful to society and lockdown is one of them - it causes harm. But there are some infection control measures which are not and which enable people to get on with their lives - wearing masks, improving ventilation.
    “Why would we not do this? When we understood that dirty water caused illness, we cleaned up the water. It cannot be a political statement to say we should clean up the air this is just fact-based decision making, but the situation] has now become all about politics.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent. 21 January 2022
  24. Sam
    Nearly 20 major healthcare bodies are appealing to the Prime Minister for better personal protection against coronavirus.
    They say at least 930 health and care workers have died of COVID-19 and more are experiencing long-term effects.
    In a letter, they say measures to stop airborne spreading are "inadequate" and call for urgent improvement in masks and other defences against variants.
    The government said it was monitoring evidence on airborne transmission and would update advice "where necessary".
    The organisations involved represent a wide range of health professionals, from doctors and nurses to dieticians and physiotherapists. Their approach to Downing Street follows repeated efforts to raise the issue with others in government.
    With health and care workers at three to four times greater risk of becoming infected than the general public, the plea to Boris Johnson is to make an "urgent intervention to prevent further loss of life". It says current policies focus on contaminated surfaces and droplets - for which the best defences are hand hygiene and social distancing - but not on airborne transmission by tiny infectious aerosols.
    The groups are demanding:
    ventilation is improved better respiratory protection, such as FFP3 masks, are provided healthcare guidance reflects the evidence of airborne transmission. Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 19 February 2021
  25. Sam
    The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has launched the first prosecution of an acute trust for failing to meet fundamental standards of care.
    East Kent Hospitals University Foundation Trust faces two charges relating to the death of Harry Richford and the risks posed to his mother during his birth. Both charges are under regulation 12 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008.
    The trust is accused of failing to discharge its duty under regulation 12 in that it failed to provide safe care and treatment exposing Harry and his mother Sarah to a significant risk of avoidable harm.
    It is only the fourth prosecution of a trust over the “fundamental standards” which were brought in following the Mid Staffordshire care scandal and are meant to be enforced by the CQC. It is also thought to be the first related to the safety of clinical care.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 9 October 2020
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