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Content ArticleEurocontrol’s HindSight magazine is a magazine on human and organisational factors in operations, in air traffic management and beyond. This issue is on the theme of Handling Surprises: Tales of the Unexpected. You will find a diverse selection of articles from frontline staff, senior managers, and specialists in operations, human factors, safety, and resilience engineering in the context of aviation, healthcare, maritime and web operations. The articles reflect surprise handling by individuals, teams and organisations from the perspectives of personal experience, theory, research and training.
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Content ArticleThis paper from Natalie Offord and colleagues describes a service redesign in which has gained learning and experience in two areas. First, a description of measured improvement by the innovation of redesigning the traditional hospital-based assessment of frail older patients’ home support needs (assess to discharge) into their own home and meeting those needs in real time (discharge to assess). In combination with the formation of a collaborative health and social care community team to deliver this new process, there has been a reduction in the length of stay from completion of acute hospital care to getting home (from 5.5 days to 1.2 days for those patients that require support at home). Second, the methodology through which this has been achieved. The authors describe their translation of a Toyota methodology used for the design of complex cars to use for engaging staff and patients in the design of a healthcare process.
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News Article
NHS Wales consultant explains why healthcare system is on verge of collapse
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS is on the verge of collapse due to demand for healthcare rising significantly faster than funding levels, a consultant has warned. Peter Neville, a consultant for NHS Wales, took to social media to explain why, in his view, the system is failing. The consultant physician, who has been working in the NHS in Yorkshire and Wales for 32 years, set out the challenges facing the health service in a Twitter thread. He said he had experienced the NHS at its best, in 2008, and its worst, in 2022. He wrote: "Over at least the past 15 years, we have seen a relentless increase in demand, both in primary care and in hospital care. This has been absolutely predictable by social statisticians for decades and is based on the fact that our elderly are surviving much longer. "Our elderly use a very large percentage of NHS of resources, unsurprisingly because they are more prone to disease, frailty, and dementia. They need more social care and hospital care as they get older. And they are living longer. (Immigrants, by the way, use much less care). "Over this period NHS funding has, broadly speaking, risen about 1-2% over inflation. If NHS funding increases with inflation yet demand increases, then clearly spend per person will drop. Demand has increased considerably above 2%, which is why the NHS is failing to manage it." Read full story Source: Wales Online, 3 January 2023 -
EventuntilThe landscape of the health and care system is ever-changing and complex. At this free online event, the expert panel will provide insight and context into the wider health and care landscape and the big issues they want to see progress in 2023. The panel will explore how recent trends and future developments could affect people working in the sector, as well as people, patients and communities. Register
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Content ArticleThe NHS saved William Fear's life and inspired him to change career. But when William started as a healthcare assistant on a hospital ward for older patients, it was clear how bad things had got. This is his story, told to the Guardian, of a typical shift
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Content ArticleNHS England has published its planning guidance for 2023/2023. The 2023/24 priorities and operational planning guidance reconfirms the ongoing need to recover our core services and improve productivity, making progress in delivering the key NHS Long Term Plan ambitions and continuing to transform the NHS for the future.
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Content ArticleHospitals are crammed full of patients, the staffing crisis in adult social care continues to escalate, and alarming numbers of junior doctors report that they are planning to quit their NHS posts to work abroad. The multiple problems confronting the UK’s health and care system are interconnected and have been years in the making. While the pandemic exacerbated many of them, hugely increasing pressures on staff, political failures and, above all, a lack of investment are making it impossible for the service to stand still this winter – let alone recover. This Guardian Editorial gives its view on the current state of the NHS.
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Content ArticleThirty seven health leaders from organisations across the UK have called on COP26 President Alok Sharma to use his leadership at COP27 to put health at the forefront of discussions. Read the letter from the link below.
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Content ArticleIs it possible to tackle climate change without further widening health inequalities? Jo Vigor speaks to Dr Dominique Allwood, Chief Medical Officer at UCL Partners and Director of Population Health at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, about her leadership journey, why clarity of mission is so important and the challenge of creating a sustainable and equitable health and care system.
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Content ArticleThis report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies examines how NHS funding, resources and treatment volumes compare with pre-pandemic levels. The study examines how the funding, staffing and hospital beds available to the NHS have changed since 2019, comparing the number of patients treated by the NHS in eight different areas compares with 2019 levels. For most areas of care, the NHS is still struggling to treat more people than it was pre-pandemic, despite having – on the face of it – additional staff and funding. The report considers a range of different factors that could explain this seeming fall in performance and output.
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News Article
Pandemic collaboration ‘no longer exists’ between NHS and private hospitals
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The collaboration seen between the independent sector and the NHS during the peaks of the pandemic “doesn’t exist any more”, the boss of one of the UK’s largest private hospital companies has said. Mr Justin Ash, chief executive of Spire Healthcare and a member of the government’s recently convened elective recovery task force, whose purpose is to ”focus on how the NHS can [better] utilise independent sector to cut the backlog’.” He told the Westminster Health Forum earlier this week: “In spirit there is collaboration but in practice, it doesn’t exist anymore. There is no more commissioning by trust[s]”. Mr Ash told the conference Spire had previously had administrative teams working at 39 different NHS hospitals examining which NHS patients could be treated at one of its facilities. That number was now three, a decline which he described as “a shame”. He said: “There has to be a mindset change. We have people say ‘you have our nurses and consultants working for you’. “[But] just like patients, nurses and consultants should be able to move around the system [as] one workforce.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 16 December 2022 -
Content ArticleRacism, xenophobia, and discrimination exist in every modern society causing avoidable disease and premature death among groups who are often already disadvantaged. This Lancet series examines how the historic systems and structures of power and oppression, and discriminatory ideologies have shaped policy and practice today, and are root causes of racial health inequities. Furthermore, by applying a global lens and intersectional framework, overlapping forms of oppression such as age, gender, and socioeconomic status and their impact on discrimination are analysed. Interventions to address the spectrum of drivers of adverse health outcomes with a focus on the structural, societal, legal, human right, institutional and system level are reviewed. Research recommendations and key approaches for moving forward are proposed.
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Content ArticleThe Patient Safety Education Project (PSEP) uses a high impact, conference-based education program grounded in adult learning principles to teach systems-based patient safety methodology to healthcare professionals. This PSEP participants handbook covers: Gaps in patient safety: A call to action External influences: Law and other factors What is patient safety?: A conceptual framework Advancing patient safety: How to teach and implement Systems thinking: Moving beyond blame to safety Human Factors design: Application for healthcare Communication: Building understanding Teamwork: Being an effective team member Organization and culture: Essential to patient safety Technology: Impact on patient safety Patients as partners: Engaging patients and families Leadership: Everybody’s job
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Content ArticleThis analysis from the Health Foundation examines how healthcare spending in the UK compares with EU countries in the decade preceding the pandemic. Taking a longer-term view enables us to see how trends in spending may have impacted healthcare resilience today.
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Content ArticleThe NHS and social care systems need more money. If there is anything else that they need as much, it is honesty from the government. Post-Covid, the UK’s health systems are in a perilously fragile state. As analysis by the Guardian showed this week, logjams created by delayed discharges appear to be getting worse. An average of 13,600 hospital beds in England are occupied by patients with nowhere else to go. As well as making new admissions impossible, unnecessarily long stays can make it harder for people to regain their independence after leaving. So far, a £500m emergency fund promised by ministers to ease the pressure has failed to materialise. It is a symptom of the social care crisis that hospitals find it so hard to discharge people who are well enough to leave.
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Content ArticleAhead of the government's medium-term fiscal plan, the annual Institute for Government/Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) public services stocktake reveals that public services won’t have returned to pre-pandemic performance by the next election, which in most cases was already worse than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. Performance Tracker reviews the state of nine public services – general practice, hospitals, adult social care, children’s social care, neighbourhood services, schools, police, criminal courts and prisons – and their comparative and inter-connected problems.
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Content Article
How can Parliament make health and care safer for all? (4 November 2022)
Mark Hughes posted an article in Others
In this blog for the cross-party think tank Policy Connect, the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care sets out its view on the biggest challenges affecting the quality and safety of health and social care outlined in its report Safer care for all - solutions from professional regulation and beyond. It describes gaps in the wider framework to protect the public highlighted in this report and considers where Parliament and the Government have an opportunity to act to support safer care for all. Related reading Patient Safety Learning: Joining up a fragmented landscape: Reflections on the PSA report ‘Safer care for all’ (12 September 2022) Working together to achieve safer care for all: a blog by Alan Clamp (12 September 2022) -
Content ArticleThis download is the second of three chapters of a book which complements the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors' Healthcare Learning Pathway and is intended as a practical resource for students.
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EventuntilNow, more than ever, the landscape of the health and care system in England is challenging and complex. Policy experts from The King’s Fund will help you gain a greater understanding of how the health and care system in England currently works and how it is changing. It will put this in the context of the current external environment by exploring the key issues in health and care, and will provide balanced and honest views about the pressures and opportunities the system faces in 2023. Taking place virtually over two days, this conference will provide you with the opportunity to interact with our experts and gain confidence working with colleagues throughout the system. Register
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Content ArticleWe need a public register to show if healthcare professionals are in the pay of industry – or more patients will suffer, writes Margaret McCartney following the publication of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review. Hospitals in England are meant to publish registers of interest of staff – but a 2016 study shows that only a minority give the details they should. A publicly accessible digital register, updated at least annually and compelled by the regulator, would create transparency and get rid of the huge amount of work that campaigners have had to do to untangle where conflicts lie. Declarations alone can’t sort the problems of conflicted medicine. But a public register would allow us to know whose advice isn’t independent. We will still need to be alert to the unintended consequences of a register, and research will be needed. The UK is lagging behind. Kath Sansom, a journalist who founded the Sling the Mesh campaign, told Margaret: “I had no idea that I couldn’t trust my doctor or surgeon to give the best advice. It is essential that medics declare industry funding.”
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News Article
NHS yet to see ‘a single penny’ of promised £500m emergency fund
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Hospitals and care homes have not received a single penny of a £500m emergency fund promised by the government to prevent the NHS becoming overwhelmed this winter, the Guardian has learned. Ministers announced they were injecting the cash into the health and social care system last month, to help get thousands of medically fit patients out of hospital into either their own home or a care home as soon as possible in an effort to better prepare the NHS for the coming months. “At the moment, one of the key challenges is discharging patients from hospital into more appropriate care settings to free up beds and help improve ambulance response times,” Thérèse Coffey, the then health and social care secretary, said on 22 September. “To tackle that, I can announce today that we are launching a £500m adult social care discharge fund for this winter.” However, the Guardian has been told that none of the funding has materialised. Senior health and social care sources described the government’s failure to release the promised cash as “inexplicable” and “outrageous”. More than 13,000 of the 100,000 NHS hospital beds in England currently contain “delayed discharge” patients, which has led to A&E units becoming heavily congested and long delays in ambulance handovers. As a direct result, thousands of 999 patients are suffering potential “severe harm” every month because ambulances are stuck outside hospitals. “Leaders across the NHS and local authorities are yet to see a single penny of this investment or any official detail on how it will be allocated,” said Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation. “Currently, only two-fifths of patients in hospital are able to leave when they are ready to do so, including due to problems accessing social care, yet health leaders still do not know how and when the £500m will be released to the system. So close to winter, this is unbelievable. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 31 October 2022 -
Content ArticleEarlier this year The King’s Fund and The Nuffield Trust published the results of the 2021 British Social Attitudes survey, which asked members of the public about their views on health and care services. The results were stark, with unprecedented drops in satisfaction across the board. But can we conclude that there has been a fundamental rupture in the relationship between the NHS and the public?
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EventThe UK continues to feel the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, both through its impact on the nation’s health, as well as the prolonged impact on the UK economy. Yet despite this, there isn’t enough attention on boosting population health, the NHS and social care to build resilience to future shocks and support economic recovery. For the 2022 REAL challenge lecture, Andy Haldane, Chief Executive of the RSA and former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, will explore the relationship between health and wealth. He will draw lessons from the pandemic and argue for a more holistic economic growth strategy where health and wealth are inextricably linked. The event will be chaired by Dr Jennifer Dixon, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation. Register
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Content ArticleThis research is a collaboration between the NHS AI Lab and Health Education England. Its primary aim is to inform the development of education and training to develop healthcare workers’ confidence in artificial intelligence (AI).
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Content ArticleThis series of short articles by the Nuffield Trust looks at common criticisms of the NHS, and provides evidence as to why they are untrue. The articles look at the following four interrelated arguments: We already spend too much on our health and despite this our outcomes are poor The NHS is a ‘sacred cow’ and has not been reformed We should copy other countries and adopt a social insurance model There is not enough use of competition and choice
