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Found 641 results
  1. News Article
    UK health officials are warning of a "hidden pandemic" of antibiotic-resistant infections if people fail to act responsibly after Covid. Cold symptoms will be more common this winter, with social mixing - but taking antibiotics is not the answer. This could encourage harmful bacteria to evade treatment and put everyone's health at risk, the UK Health Security Agency says. One in five people with an infection in 2020 had an antibiotic-resistant one. And if the bacteria causing their infection no longer responds to treatment with these common medicines, this can cause serious complications and lead to hospital admission. Antibiotics should be taken or prescribed only when really needed, for example to treat bacterial infections such as sepsis, meningitis or pneumonia. They can also help protect against infection during chemotherapy, Caesarean sections and other common surgeries. However they are sometimes prescribed to treat coughs, earache and sore throats, on which they have little or no effect. UKHSA chief medical adviser Dr Susan Hopkins said antimicrobial resistance was a "hidden pandemic" and it was important "we do not come out of Covid-19 and enter into another crisis". Serious antibiotic-resistant infections "will rise once again if we don't act responsibly", she added. "As we head into winter, with increasing amounts of respiratory infections in circulation, it is important to remember that antibiotics are not needed for many cold-like symptoms. "Stay at home if you feel unwell," she said. "Taking antibiotics when you do not need them only puts you and your loved ones at more risk in the future, so please listen to your GP, nurse, dentist or pharmacist's advice." Read full story Source: BBC News, 17 November 2021
  2. News Article
    Politicians and doctors in Germany have called for urgent action to control the spread of COVID-19 after a record number of cases were reported on 11 November. Germany had 50 196 new confirmed Covid cases on 11 November, up from 39 676 cases on 10 November and 9658 on 1 November, showed figures from the Robert Koch Institute. A total of 235 Covid related deaths were reported on 11 November, up from 23 on 1 November. Speaking in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, the federal vice chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said that immediate steps must be taken to “winterproof” Germany against what is being described as the nation’s fourth wave of Covid-19. Scholz will meet next week with the prime ministers of Germany’s 16 states to discuss new measures to fight the pandemic. “The virus is still with us and threatens the health of citizens,” Scholz said, adding that efforts must be intensified to convince unvaccinated Germans to become fully vaccinated and encourage those already vaccinated to have the booster shot." Everything must be done, he said, to ensure “that millions of citizens get a booster—that is the task of the next weeks and months.” Read full story Source: BMJ, 12 November 2021
  3. News Article
    A global threat in the form of a measles outbreak is mounting as more than 22 million infants missed their first vaccine dose for the disease in 2020, warned the world’s top health agencies. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), in a joint statement on Wednesday, said the number represents the largest increase in missed vaccinations in two decades. The 22-million figure is three million more than in 2019, “creating dangerous conditions for outbreaks to occur,” according to the agencies. The surveillance of measles cases deteriorated because of the coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in a reported dip in cases by more than 80%t in 2020, the statement said. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses to date. It kills more than 60,000 people a year, mostly young children. But at the same time, the disease is entirely preventable through vaccinations, which have averted more than 30 million deaths from the disease globally. “Large numbers of unvaccinated children, outbreaks of measles, and disease detection and diagnostics diverted to support Covid-19 responses are factors that increase the likelihood of measles-related deaths and serious complications in children,” said Kevin Cain, the CDC’s global immunisation director. Read full story Source: The Independent, 11 November 2021
  4. News Article
    Long waiting times in emergency departments are becoming normal, with some patients spending days in A&E wards before they can be moved into other hospital beds, emergency physicians have warned. Leaders of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) and the Society for Acute Medicine (SAM) said that some hospitals had effectively run out of space, meaning patients could not receive the right care until a bed became free. NHS figures for September show that 5,025 patients waited for more than 12 hours to be admitted to hospital in England. That is only 1% of the 506,916 admitted via A&Es, but it is more than 10 times as many as the 458 waiting more than 12 hours in September 2019 and nearly twice as many as the January peak of 2,847. Scientists at the Zoe Covid study said last week that UK cases of coronavirus may have peaked. But the React study at Imperial College found that the R number was between 0.9 and 1.1 with Covid cases at their highest levels. Pressures on hospitals have prompted the Royal College of Nursing to call for a return to compulsory mask-wearing, while Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said that ministers should reimpose a legal obligation to wear masks on public transport, allowing police to enforce the law. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 7 November 2021
  5. News Article
    More than 11,000 people who died from Covid probably caught the deadly virus while in hospital for other reasons, it has emerged. Freedom of information requests to NHS trusts across England has revealed as many as one in eight people who have died in hospital from coronavirus during the pandemic actually arrived free of the virus. An investigation by the Daily Telegraph has revealed 11,688 people are listed by the NHS as either probably or definitely catching the virus which killed them while in hospital. Probable cases are those who tested positive at least eight days after admission, while definite cases require the patient to not have tested positive until they had been on the wards for at least 15 days. The figures emerged as the government was expected to announce it will be mandatory for all NHS staff to be vaccinated against Covid by next spring. Read full story Source: The Independent, 9 November 2021
  6. News Article
    A trial testing for Group B Strep during pregnancies has been welcomed by a mum who lost her son to the bacterial infection. The trial at Derriford Hospital will see routine testing for the bacteria that can put newborns at risk. Dawn Byly lost her third child Leo to the infection a day after he was born in Truro in 2003. "I would love to think this might help prevent other families going through such a traumatic loss," she said. About one in four pregnant women are carriers of Group B Strep. Most do not have any symptoms, but it can spread to their child during labour and in a small number of cases the infection can be life-threatening. Currently only women identified as being at risk are tested and if positive are offered antibiotics during labour and birth. Tests are available privately and involve a late swab in pregnancy. "Suffering the loss of a child is a tragedy and we are committed to making sure all women get the right support and best possible maternity care," said the Department of Health and Social Care. "The UK National Screening Committee reviewed the evidence to screen for Group B Strep at 35 to 37 weeks of pregnancy in 2017 and concluded there was insufficient evidence to introduce a national screening programme," it added. Dr Alexander Taylor, from Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, said: "It's felt uncomfortable as an obstetrician in the UK knowing America, Canada and many of our European neighbours have been routinely screening for Group B Strep. "This large trial aims to uncover both the clinical effectiveness but also the cost effectiveness of instituting a programme like this." Read full story Source: BBC News, 9 November 2021
  7. News Article
    Deborah Birx, who was the White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, has told a congressional inquiry that at least 129 000 lives could have been saved if his administration had provided adequate testing and properly communicated the gravity of the situation to the public. But the election year “just took people’s time away and distracted them from the pandemic,” she told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. “I felt like the White House had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season.” Asked if Trump did everything he should have to counter the pandemic, she said, “No. And I’ve said that to the White House. I believe I was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do.” “If we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, then we probably could have decreased fatalities by 30-40%.” That would amount to at least 129 000 preventable covid deaths over the course of the Trump presidency, which saw roughly 429 000 reported deaths attributed to the coronavirus." Read full story Source: BMJ, 28 October 2021
  8. News Article
    The laboratory at the centre of the Covid testing fiasco returned just four positive results out of more than 2,400 tests sent to it from one city, the Guardian has learned, raising questions about why it was not discovered sooner. The positivity rate of just 0.2% from Sheffield tests sent to the Wolverhampton lab run by Immensa contrasts sharply with the national rate of about 5-8% at the time of the scandal. Data released under freedom of information laws by Sheffield city council showed there were four positive results, 2,391 negative and 13 void results processed by the lab from 1 September until it was suspended in mid-October. The disclosure also shows the scandal covers local authorities as far away from Wolverhampton as Yorkshire, with the UK Health Security Agency refusing to disclose which areas are affected beyond saying they are mostly in south-west England. One expert suggested there should have been about 200 positive results based on prevalence figures from the time. Kit Yates, a senior lecturer in mathematics at Bath University, said the country needed to see a full list of all the walk-in/drive in centres that were affected. “It’s all well and good notifying those people who were tested, but because of the nature of this communicable disease, this scandal now reaches well beyond those people,” he said. “The public deserve to know if their area was affected.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 27 October 2021
  9. News Article
    The government is being “wilfully negligent” by not introducing measures to suppress the recent rise in coronavirus cases, the chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) has said. Dr Chaand Nagpaul made the comments after the health secretary ignored NHS leaders’ pleas for the implementation of ‘Plan B’, which could see the return of mandatory mask wearing in indoor spaces and the need to work from home where possible. Speaking at a No 10 press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Sajid Javid said the current pressure on the NHS was not “unsustainable”, noting that the contingency plan would only be introduced if hospitals were at risk of being “overwhelmed”. However, Dr Nagpaul disagreed with the minister’s assessment, suggesting that the NHS was already reaching breaking point and that the government should follow through on its promise to protect the health service. “By the health secretary’s own admission we could soon see 100,000 cases a day and we now have the same number of weekly Covid deaths as we had during March, when the country was in lockdown,” he said. Dr Nagpaul described the government’s decision not to take further preventative action as “wilfully negligent”, branding the current rate of coronavirus infections and deaths as “unacceptable”. Read full story Source: The Independent, 21 October 2021
  10. News Article
    Some acute trusts have failed to report large numbers of hospital-acquired covid infections as patient safety incidents, despite NHS England describing this as ‘fundamental’. HSJ examined the numbers of “infection control” patient safety incidents reported to the national reporting and learning system in 2020-21, and compared this to separate NHS England data on covid infections most likely to have been acquired in hospital. The number of incidents reported to the NRLS in the 12-month period should in theory be higher, as it covers all types of hospital-acquired infections, while the NHSE data only covered covid infections in the last seven months of the year. This appears to hold true nationally, with almost 59,000 incidents reported to the NRLS, compared to around 36,000 likely hospital-acquired covid infections suggested by the NHSE data. But for around a third of trusts, the incident numbers reported to the NRLS were smaller, with some appearing to report very low numbers. Helen Hughes, chief executive of patient safety charity Patient Safety Learning, said: “The scale of the under-reporting set out in these findings is particularly concerning.” “As this data informs assessment of performance at both organisational and national levels, it is possible that this could create a false assurance about the extent of harm in this period,” Ms Hughes said. “Where organisations are now retrospectively completing serious incident reports, there are obvious questions as to whether key insights will have been lost as memories of incidents fade over time and their causes.” “However, they rely on the capacity and commitment of staff behind them. The pandemic has placed an enormous strain on the health service and we have heard from staff the time constraints this has put on them to report patient safety incidents,” she added. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 October 2021
  11. News Article
    Deaths from COVID-19 in England in the first half of 2021 could exceed those seen in the whole of 2020 unless the vaccination programme is vastly increased and a national lockdown implemented—with educational settings closed for at least a month—researchers have warned. In a preprint released on 24 December, researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine used modelling to compare the effects of varying COVID-19 restrictions on the virus spread, hospital and intensive care admissions, and deaths from 15 December 2020 to 30 June 2021. The model took account of the new variant spreading rapidly in southern England, which it estimated to be 56% more transmissible than non-variant COVID-19. The study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, said that control measures similar to the November national lockdown would be “unlikely to reduce the effective reproduction number to less than 1, unless primary schools, secondary schools, and universities are also closed.” It added that it would be necessary to “greatly accelerate vaccine rollout to have an appreciable impact in suppressing the resulting disease burden.” Read full story Source: BMJ, 29 December 2020
  12. News Article
    The number of people likely to have caught COVID-19 in NHS hospitals in England has risen by more than a third in the last week. The 35% rise in probable hospital-acquired COVID-19 from 6 to 13 December is the highest weekly increase since 30 October, HSJ analysis of NHS England data reveals. Hospital-acquired infections are rising across areas such as London, the South East, and South West, and also at some hospitals in the North East, Yorkshire and the Midlands. At some trusts, the weekly total of likely hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections has more than doubled since last week. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 December 2020
  13. News Article
    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
  14. News Article
    The government’s plan to allow up to three households to mix at Christmas is a “major error that will cost many lives” and should be stopped, the editors of two leading medical journals have said. In a rare joint editorial, the editors of the British Medical Journal and Health Service Journal have said the government’s plan to relax coronavirus restrictions for five days between 23 and 27 December is a serious “blunder” that will put more pressure on the NHS and cause thousands of operations to be cancelled. The article published jointly on Tuesday says: “The government was too slow to introduce restrictions in the spring and again in the autumn. It should now reverse its rash decision to allow household mixing and instead extend the tiers over the five-day Christmas period in order to bring numbers down in the advance of a likely third wave.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 15 December 2020
  15. News Article
    Trusts’ infection control measures will be put under greater scrutiny by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), HSJ has been told. In an effort to cut hospital-acquired COVID-19, the CQC will carry out focused inspections which will assess “in more detail the leadership and delivery of infection prevention control”. According to NHS England/Improvement figures, around 9% of covid inpatients definitely caught the virus in hospital. However, the number could be higher as NHSE/I figures — released on Friday — showed 21% of COVID-19 patients in hospitals were “probably” acquired in hospitals. HSJ understands the CQC plans to carry out up to 20 infection control focused inspections in the early part of 2021. The CQC told HSJ it is reviewing local nosocomial infection rates on a weekly basis, using the data alongside “wider intelligence” from other sources to monitor trusts’ risk, with inspections carried out at providers where specific concerns are picked up. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 14 December 2020
  16. News Article
    The number of COVID-19 infections likely to have been acquired in hospital are rising again for the first time in three weeks and their proportion of all cases has reached record levels for the second wave, HSJ can reveal. NHS England data covering the week to 6 December (the latest available) shows 1,787 COVID-19 cases were acquired in-hospital – a rise of almost 14% on the week before. The number of hospital-acquired, or “nosocomial”, infections had been falling since the week to 15 November, when 1,794 were recorded. This week, hospital acquired covid infections amounted to 21% of the 8,337 new cases which were recorded in hospitals – the highest proportion in the second wave. On 6 December alone, 24% of infections had probably been acquired in hospital rather than the community. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 11 December 2020
  17. News Article
    A hospital has apologised after an elderly cancer patient tested positive for coronavirus, having been left in a ward with another patient suffering from COVID-19 for several days. The Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, which serves the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, Wales, has confirmed that it is dealing with an outbreak of the virus at the hospital. It comes after Lesley Pook accused the hospital of “locking” her father James ‘Jim’ Pook and others in a ward with a coronavirus patient and “waiting for them all to develop symptoms”. Read full story Source: The Independent, 9 December 2020
  18. News Article
    A hospital serving the prime minister’s constituency has been issued a warning notice by inspectors over poor infection control, including staff having to share two small toilet cubicles for changing. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) announced it has issued the notice to The Hillingdon Hospitals FT today following an unannounced inspection in September. It comes after the watchdog placed urgent conditions on the provider following a coronavirus outbreak among staff at Hillingdon Hospital in August. At least 70 members of staff had to isolate, some of whom had tested positive for covid. The watchdog said it found there had been improvements, but that “further work is needed”. The CQC’s inspection report, published today, said there were no staff changing rooms available for people to change in and out of their scrubs, and that they were sharing two small toilet cubicles at the start and end of shifts. These were not cleaned with an “enhanced” cleaning schedule, it added, and the lack of separate changing rooms “caused a risk of cross-contamination”. However, senior leaders were aware of the risk and were seeking ways to improve access to changing areas for staff. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 December 2020
  19. News Article
    Health inspectors in England have been moving between care homes with high levels of COVID-19 infection without being tested, raising fears they have put more residents at risk of catching the virus, leaks to the Guardian have revealed. In recent weeks all care home inspections carried out in the north of England have been of infected homes, including a facility where 38 of the 41 people receiving care and 30 staff – almost half of the workers – had tested positive, internal documents from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) show. Over the last two months inspectors have been checking infection control procedures and care standards in up to 600 care homes, many of which were dealing with outbreaks of COVID-19, but the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has yet to provide testing. The CQC said on Friday it was expecting to start testing inspectors “in the coming weeks”. Weekly Covid deaths in care homes have been rising. In the week to 20 November, 398 people were notified to the CQC as having died from Covid, up from 138 a month earlier. The death toll remains lower than at the peak of the pandemic, when more than 2,500 people were dying a week in late April. The situation has sparked “very real anxieties about contracting the disease” and spreading it between infected homes, the leaked memos reveal. One inspector described work to his managers as like “going into the eye of the storm”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 27 November 2020
  20. News Article
    People aged 50 to 64 in England will be able to get a free flu jab from 1 December in an attempt to fight the "twin threats" of flu and COVID-19. The group has been added to a list of people who are already eligible for a flu jab in England, such as those over 65 and health and social care workers. Thirty million people are being offered the vaccine in England's largest flu-immunisation programme to date. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said it was a winter "like no other". "We have to worry about the twin threats of flu and COVID-19," he said, adding that the coronavirus pandemic meant it was "more important than ever" that people got their flu jabs. Mr Hancock told BBC Breakfast that all over 50s would be able to get the vaccine by January. Read full story Source: BBC News, 20 November 2020
  21. News Article
    The NHS is going into this winter with 5,500 fewer general acute beds than last year, NHS England data has revealed. The numbers of general and acute beds open overnight from July to September this year was 94,787 compared with 100,370 for the same period in 2019, a fall of 5.6% or 5,583 beds. The reduction in bed numbers is thought to be partly because of covid infection control measures, such as creating more distance between beds. HSJ reported this week that Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust had taken nearly 100 beds out of use to allow for better social distancing. The figures showed significant regional differences. London had 8% fewer beds available compared with last year, while the East of England and the North East only had 3.4% fewer. The North West, which has been badly affected by the second wave of covid, had 6.6% fewer beds than last year. NHS Providers deputy chief executive Saffron Cordery said: “We have been arguing for some time that the NHS is short of beds as we head into winter… This is a real problem as trusts deal with pressures posed by the virus, growing demand for urgent and emergency care and the work to recover the backlog of routine operations.” Nuffield Trust deputy director of research Sarah Scobie said: “This drop in the number of beds available bears out our warning that infection control will mean a loss of capacity even between waves of the virus. Many of these will have been beds too close to others for physical distancing. This is why it will be so difficult to return to previous rates of activity while the virus remains at large, worsening waiting times and forcing difficult decisions about who gets priority." Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 19 November 2020
  22. News Article
    Lifting lockdown must be handled better this time round to avoid a surge in Covid that could overwhelm the NHS, doctors say. The British Medical Association has published a blueprint for how it thinks England should proceed with any easing. It includes replacing the "rule of six" with a two-households restriction to reduce social mixing and banning travel between different local lockdown tiers. Government has yet to say if or exactly how England will exit on 2 December. It will decide next week, based on whether cases have fallen enough and how much strain hospitals are under. Read full story Source: BBC News, 18 November 2020
  23. News Article
    Coronavirus cases in the US will spike after Thanksgiving, further stressing health care systems and prompting new restrictions, an emergency physician said Saturday, as states continued to report soaring numbers of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Dr. James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, told CNN's Erica Hill he is "terrified" about what's going to happen this holiday season. "We're going to see an unprecedented surge of cases following Thanksgiving this year, and if people don't learn from Thanksgiving, we're going to see it after Christmas as well," Phillips said. Already, grim indicators offer a glimpse of what's to come. A little more than a week after the US first topped 100,000 daily infections, it reported a record of more than 184,000 new cases Friday. Hospitalisations also hit a new high – for the fourth consecutive day – with more than 68,500 COVID-19 patients nationwide, according to the COVID Tracking Project. And the country's daily death toll has topped 1,300 at least three times this week. "Things are going to get much, much worse," said Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and former Baltimore Health Commissioner. She expressed concern over the impact on the already-strained health care system when the new cases added in recent days are reflected in hospitalisations. Read full story Source: CNN, 15 November 2020
  24. News Article
    The NHS is ready to start providing the new coronavirus vaccine "as fast as safely possible", Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said. Asked whether it could be available by Christmas, he said that was "absolutely a possibility" - but he expected the mass roll-out "in the first part of next year". He said vaccination clinics would be open seven days a week, and he was giving GPs an extra £150m. On Monday, early results from the world's first effective coronavirus vaccine showed it could prevent more than 90% of people from getting Covid. The vaccine has been developed by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech and is one of 11 vaccines that are currently in the final stages of testing. The UK has already ordered 40 million doses - enough to vaccinate up to 20 million people as each person will need two doses for it to work effectively. Asked how many people would need to be vaccinated before life can return to normal, Matt Hancock said: "Well the answer to that is we just don't know." "So the trials can tell you if a vaccine is clinically safe and if it's effective at protecting an individual from the disease. What we can't know, until we've vaccinated a significant proportion of the population, is how much it stops the transmission of the disease." Mr Hancock told BBC Radio 4's Today programme it would be "a mammoth logistical operation" and highlighted some of the challenges, including getting it from Belgium to the UK while not removing from a temperature of -70C more than four times. Older care home residents and care home staff are at the top of a list from government scientific advisers of who would get immunised first, followed by health workers. Mr Hancock said NHS staff would go into care homes to vaccinate residents, as well as setting up vaccination venues. Children would not be vaccinated, he said. However, Prof Sir John Bell from Oxford University said: "I would worry about not giving this to as wide a percentage of the population as we can." "I'm more of the view that we need to vaccinate further into the population and vaccinate younger people as well, partly because we don't really know what the long term effects of this disease are." The vaccine will not be released for use until it passes final safety tests and gets the go-ahead from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. Read full story Source: BBC News, 10 November 2020
  25. News Article
    The NHS will rollout twice-weekly asymptomatic testing for all patient-facing staff by the end of next week, according to a letter from NHS medical director Stephen Powis. Government said only last week that universal asymptomatic staff testing would start in December, but government has now agreed it will bring this forward to this week for a first tranche of 34 trusts; and all others next week. The tests at 34 trusts this week will cover “over 250,000 staff,” Professor Powis said. He set out plans for the new testing regime in a letter to Commons health and social care committee chair Jeremy Hunt who has been pressing the government for routine staff testing since the summer. “Staff will be asked to test themselves at home twice a week with results available before coming into work,” Professor Powis said. The new testing regime can start following “further scientific validation of the lateral flow testing modality last week, and confirmation over the weekend from Test and Trace that they can now supply the NHS with sufficient test kits”. Read full story Source: HSJ, 9 November 2020
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