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Found 963 results
  1. News Article
    Nine in 10 NHS dental practices across the UK are not accepting new adult patients for treatment under the health service, a BBC investigation has found. BBC's research shows no dentists taking on adult NHS patients could be found in a third of the UK's top-tier councils. And eight in 10 NHS practices are not taking on children. The Department of Health said it had made an extra £50m available "to help bust the Covid backlogs" and that improving NHS access was a priority. BBC News contacted nearly 7,000 NHS practices - believed to be almost all those offering general treatment to the public. The British Dental Association (BDA) called it "the most comprehensive and granular assessment of patient access in the history of the service". While NHS dental treatment is not free for most adults, it is subsidised. The BBC heard from people across the UK who could not afford private fees and said the subsidised rates were crucial to getting care. The lack of NHS appointments has led people to drive hundreds of miles in search of treatment, pull out their own teeth without anaesthesia, resort to making their own improvised dentures and restrict their long-term diets to little more than soup. Read full story Source: BBC News, 8 August 2022
  2. News Article
    A&E waits are now “apocalyptic” and “worse than ever imagined” leaked NHS data shows, and could be driving 1,000 patient deaths a month, The Independent can reveal. Almost 700,000 people have waited more than 12 hours in A&E in the first seven months of 2022, according to leaked NHS data. The “hidden” monthly trolley waits, not published in national data, have more than doubled this year in comparison to 2019. Dr Katherine Henderson, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, warned data shows trolley waits are “worse than ever imagined” and said it is “scandalous” the real figures are not published despite promises. Dr Henderson warned the deterioration in A&E waiting times is the result of “decades of underfunding” and “unheeded warnings” over staffing and social care. In one message to staff in Nottinghamshire, seen by The Independent, hospital leaders said last week patients were waiting more than 40 hours for beds in A&E, while some areas of the hospital were running on a 1:14 staffing ratios and patients were waiting at home with no care. Read full story Source: The Independent, 1 August 2022
  3. News Article
    NHS leaders across England say staffing gaps and a lack of capacity in social care are putting the care and safety of patients in the NHS at risk. Almost 250 NHS leaders responding to an NHS Confederation survey say that patients are being delayed in hospital much longer than they should, with the knock-on impact resulting in higher demand on A&E departments and longer ambulance response times. More than 9 in 10 NHS leaders warn of a social care workforce crisis in their area which they expect will get worse this winter. Nearly all NHS leaders say the lack of capacity in social care is putting the care and safety of patients at risk. More than four in five warn that the absence of care packages for people to be able to return home or be moved into a care home is the main reason why medically fit patients are stuck in hospital longer than they should be. Almost all NHS leaders say that the most impactful solution would be better pay for social care staff and want the Government to increase investment in social care as a priority. An acute trust executive director in the South West accused the Government of presiding over a “national scandal.” “If the social care capacity shortfall was solved then we would not be holding ambulances at all, we would have almost no problems with elective recovery and our emergency departments would not be crowded and unsafe,” they said. Another acute trust chair in the East of England added: “The result of using nearly 20 per cent of our beds for patients who are medically fit but need packages of care to return home is an overcrowded A&E, twelve-hour trolley waits and much delayed ambulance handover times. The connection is very clear to us…Until we find a solution to social care staffing and funding, the situation can only get worse.” Commenting on the survey results Lord Victor Adebowale, chair of the NHS Confederation, said: “Decades of delay and inertia have left social care services chronically underfunded and in desperate need of more support. “NHS leaders stand alongside their sister services in social care in wanting a rescue package for the sector. They are sounding the alarm and sending a clear message to Government that the social care system has not been ‘fixed’." Read full story Source: NHS Confederation, 28 July 2022
  4. News Article
    The decades-old routine of visiting an NHS dentist for a six-month checkup is being scrapped across England and Wales for most adults as part of changes designed to address the dire lack of access to dental care for many people. Wales has announced that most adults now only need to see their dentist once a year, which the government in Cardiff says will free up NHS dentists’ time and allow them to take on more than 100,000 extra patients annually. The Labour-controlled Welsh government also hinted it wanted to recruit disillusioned dentists from England by offering chances to develop skills such as carrying out more complex surgery within their practices. Its announcement came after the UK government wrote to NHS dentists last week saying that under the first changes to the dental contract in 16 years, healthy people will only need a checkup every two years. It said this complied with guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which says dental teams should see patients for a checkup based on their health risk, which can be once every two years instead of every six months. Both governments claimed the moves would allow more people to find NHS care but dentists’ representatives in England and Wales described the changes as “tinkering” and “marginal tweaks”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 27 July 2022
  5. News Article
    Five wards at Scotland's largest hospital had to operate with one registered nurse on duty each. Staff at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow experienced the shortage on Monday night. It is an example of the severe pressure affecting health services across the country, which has intensified due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Greater Glasgow and Clyde health board said nurses were supported by a number of other staff. Originally reported in the Daily Record, the shortage was described to staff in an email sent on Monday afternoon. The email said nurse staffing levels across medicine were critical, despite attempts to seek support from bank or agency workers. It said admin staff had been asked to stay on to offer support including answering phones and door buzzers for the rest of the week. As well as staffing problems, the pandemic has caused more bed blocking in Scotland's hospitals and longer waits for both emergency and outpatient treatment. Norman Provan, associate director at the Royal College of Nursing Scotland said the shortage had an impact on patient safety as well as staff wellbeing - concerns that had been raised with the health board and the Scottish government. He added: "We're in this situation largely because of the failure of Scottish government to address the nursing workforce crisis, which has seen registered nurse vacancies reach a record high. "Urgent action is needed to protect patient safety, address staff shortages and demonstrate that the nursing workforce is valued as a safety critical profession." Read full story Source: BBC News, 24 July 2022
  6. News Article
    One of the NHS’s biggest hospital trusts has declared its cancer waiting list is now at an ‘unmanageable size’. Mid and South Essex Foundation Trust leaders set out the stark judgement in a paper for its July board meeting, held last week. The report said: “The 62-day [referral to treatment backlog as of 3 July] has increased for the second consecutive week to 1,055. “[The cancer patient tracking list] is getting bigger and has reached an unmanageable size. Referral rates have plateaued from March 2021 [but] treatment rates have not increased in line with PTL growth. “This points to a noisy PTL, where the hospital is extremely busy managing patients who do not have cancer.” The paper also said NHS England had recognised the trust’s 62-day cancer target needed to be delivered “in more realistic and achievable stages”. It highlighted particular concerns around a “serious” demand and capacity problem in its dermatology department which contributed to almost half of its 62-day backlog. The trust had 445 62-day RTT cancer breaches in dermatology alone in May, the latest data reported. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 22 July 2022
  7. News Article
    A shortage of maternity staff is putting women and babies at risk in Gloucestershire, inspectors have said. The county's maternity services have been downgraded by two levels, from good to inadequate, by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Its report highlighted staff shortages, missed training, exhaustion among workers and concerns over equipment. Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust issued an apology and said improvements have been made. CQC inspectors visited maternity wards, birth units and community midwives in Gloucester, Cheltenham and Stroud in April after receiving concerns about the "culture, safety and quality of services". They found the service did not have enough midwifery staff with the "right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep women safe from avoidable harm or to provide the right treatment all the time". Read full story Source: BBC News, 22 July 2022
  8. News Article
    Doctors’ leaders have reacted with incredulity to demands that all hospitals in England take “immediate steps” to find extra space for patients so that no ambulance waits longer than 30 minutes. A letter from NHS England sent to the heads of NHS trusts, integrated care boards, and ambulance trusts acknowledged that this will not be easy “and that it may place additional burden on staff at an already challenging time. The letter was sent on 15 July, in response to the increased pressure on ambulance services over the past year and in light of the current heatwave. It said, “All systems that are currently unable to offload ambulances within 30 minutes should now take further steps to create capacity within acute hospitals to ensure the rapid release of vehicles. This will require risk based decisions to be made about both the use of estate and deployment of clinical workforce.” Vishal Sharma, chair of the consultants committee at the BMA, said, “The government should be ashamed that it has come to this. If hospitals had the space or the staff to allow them to care for these patients, they wouldn’t be waiting in ambulances at the hospital door in the first place. The sad fact is that after decades of underinvestment, our hospitals are under-resourced, under-bedded, and understaffed.” Read full story Source: BMJ, 18 July 2022
  9. News Article
    Medical experts in cases involving doctors should have a mandatory duty to consider systems issues such as inadequate staffing levels to avoid them being scapegoated for wider failures, the Medical Protection Society (MPS) has said. The MPS, which supports the the professional interests of more than 300,000 healthcare professionals around the world, says medical expert reports focus on scrutinising the actions of the individual doctor even when failings are a result of the setting in which they work. Its report on the issue, shared with the Guardian before publication, points out that for doctors “adverse opinion can lead to loss of career or liberty”. It references the case of Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba who was convicted of gross negligence manslaughter in 2015 and handed a 24-month suspended sentence for her part in the death of six-year-old Jack Adcock from sepsis. She was later struck off by the General Medical Council before the court of appeal overturned the GMC’s decision. Dr Rob Hendry, the MPS medical director, said: “In giving an opinion on whether or not the care provided by a doctor has fallen short of a reasonable standard, it would seem fair to the doctor that the medical expert considers all relevant circumstances. Any individual performance concerns must of course be addressed, but doctors should not be scapegoats for the failings of the settings in which they work. Sadly, we see this all too often in cases against doctors … “Many expert reports focus solely on the actions of the individual without considering the wider context. In reality, patient harm arising from medical error is rarely attributable to the actions of a single individual. Inadequate staffing levels, lack of resources, or faulty IT systems are just some issues which can contribute to adverse incidents. Doctors confront these issues every day and have little influence over them.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 18 July 2022
  10. News Article
    A senior hospital nurse said she could not discharge 180 patients due to a lack of "care and support" at home. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital said among the people that did not need to be in hospital was a patient who had been there for 145 days. Claire Fare, senior discharge matron, said delays "impact on the whole of the flow" of patients. Norfolk County Council's social care department blamed the "national care crisis" for the problems. In June, the hospital, which has about 1,200 beds, pleaded for family and friends to help look after fit patients to ease demand. Melanie Syson, the hospital's discharge coordinator, said there was a person in the hospital ready for discharge that had been there for more than four months. "She is medically fit to be discharged but we are waiting for support to be ready at home," she said. Ms Syson added: "The length of stay of the patients seems to be getting longer." To help cope with the delays, the hospital opened a "home-first unit" in January for patients who did not need acute care but it was unable to discharge. The unit focuses on rehabilitation to try to prevent the patients coming back into hospital or requiring more care at home. Stephanie Ward, the ward sister, said it aimed to "give patients the time they need to do things themselves as much as they can". Read full story Source: BBC News, 15 July 2022
  11. News Article
    Serious incidents causing patient harm have increased steeply compared to previous years at an ambulance service whose nursing director still expects will “fail” next month under mounting service pressures. There were 98 patient harm incidents at West Midlands Ambulance Service in June, official data obtained by HSJ suggests, up from 49 in the same month last year. The figures show that from April-June this year, 262 harm incidents have been logged – a 240% on 77 in the same period in 2019 and a 71% on 153 last year. Nursing director Mark Docherty, who previously warned the service was facing a “Titanic moment” and would “all fail” around a specific date of 17 August, said much of the increase can be attributed to worsening hospital handover delays. More than 700 people at one time waited for ambulances “that were not going to turn up” on Monday, according to Mr Docherty, who described the situation as a “really dangerous place to be”. Mr Docherty explained how the harm incidents, including deaths, resulted from growing delays: ”You can’t underplay the risk. If you’ve got 750 patients like we did on Monday waiting, none of those patients have been assessed. “Sadly, amongst them there will have been patients with stroke who won’t be treated because they’ve waited too long." Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 July 2022
  12. News Article
    Ambulance services are under intense pressure, with record numbers of callouts and the most urgent, category-one, calls last month. BBC Two's Newsnight programme spent from 08:00 to 20:00 on Monday at six hospitals with the longest delays handing patients over from paramedics to accident and emergency staff. This should take 15 minutes or less - but crews often wait many hours and sometimes whole 12-hour shifts, with ambulances queuing outside unable to respond to other emergency calls. At Royal Cornwall, 25 ambulances were queuing by the afternoon, three for at least 10-and-a-half hours, at Derriford, in Plymouth, 20 were queuing up to 11 hours in an overflow car park and the longest wait at Heartlands was more than five hours. "We're right on the fringe of collapse right now," a paramedic who has worked in emergency care for more than a decade said. "People are phoning and being told that they're not going to get an ambulance for six or nine hours. And that's happening routinely - that is happening pretty much every shift." "It would be wrong to say that there are times when I haven't shed a tear... for the people we haven't been able to help because it's been too late," the paramedic said. "They may have died anyway but there are definitely cases that I've been to where we should have been to them sooner and less harm would have come to them." Read full story Source: BBC News, 15 July 2022
  13. News Article
    A health minister incorrectly told the Commons yesterday “we have procured a contract” for surge support for ambulance services, despite the contract not having been awarded yet, HSJ has learned. There are also doubts about two other points made by health minister Maria Caulfield in Parliament yesterday in a debate about the current high pressure on ambulance services. She said: “We have procured a contract with a total value of £30m for an auxiliary ambulance service, which will provide national surge capacity if needed to support the ambulance response during periods of increased pressure. That capacity is there, should we need it.” However, NHS England, which advertised the contract in May, confirmed to HSJ today that it “is yet to be awarded”. Ms Caulfield was responding to an urgent question from Labour shadow health and social care secretary Wes Streeting about pressure on ambulance services and the heatwave. HSJ reported on Tuesday that all 10 major ambulance services in England were on the highest level of alert. Read full story (paywalled) Source: 14 July 2022
  14. News Article
    More than a quarter of nursing staff in hospitals across the UK say patient care is being compromised due to treatment taking place in the wrong setting. Investment in the nursing workforce is needed now, the Royal College of Nursing insists, as survey findings show clinical care is taking place in settings such as hospital corridors and waiting rooms rather than on wards. The poll of more than 20,000 nursing and midwifery staff found the situation is worst in emergency care settings where nearly two-thirds of respondents reported the problem. Elsewhere, more than a quarter of nursing staff who responded say patients are being treated in the wrong setting, meaning their care is being compromised and even made unsafe. Staff shortages are a key factor, and across health and social care settings this is causing delays to patients being discharged into the community. This leaves hospitals full, with emergency care staff having to provide care in inappropriate settings. One specific issue identified by respondents was extra beds being added to wards, making carrying out care more difficult, and leading to a lack of privacy for patients and their families. A nurse who works on an NHS adult acute ward in Scotland said patients and their relatives had complained about an extra bed being squeezed into a four-bedded bay, meaning they had no buzzer, no curtains and were not two-metre distanced. She added: “I feel incredibly frustrated and embarrassed. It is totally inappropriate for ward rounds, nursing procedures, COVID precautions and an extra stress on staff.” Read full story Source: Royal College of Nursing, 14 July 2022
  15. News Article
    A spike in Covid absences and the extended heatwave have left NHS hospitals and ambulance services struggling to cope. The hot weather is also driving more patients to A&E departments, and callers are being urged not to use 999 except in serious emergencies. All 10 ambulance trusts in England are on black alert, the highest level, while health leaders warn that “ill-equipped” hospital buildings are struggling to store medicines correctly amid the abnormally high temperatures. Martin Flaherty, managing director of the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, said: “The NHS ambulance sector is under intense pressure, with all ambulance services operating at the highest level of four within their local resource escalation action plans, normally only ever reserved for major incidents or short-term periods of unusual demand. “Severe delays in ambulance crews being able to hand over their patients at many hospital emergency departments are having a very significant impact on the ambulance sector’s ability to respond to patients as quickly as we would like to, because our crews and vehicles are stuck outside those hospitals.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 12 July 2022
  16. News Article
    Patients may be turned away at A&E in Portsmouth as the UK’s heatwave drives extreme hospital pressures. Staffing pressures coupled with additional strain from the current heatwave have forced Portsmouth Hospitals University Foundation Trust to declare a critical incident. The trust said it only had space in its emergency department for patients with life-threatening illnesses and critical conditions and so would be forced to redirect other patients elsewhere. In a statement, Portsmouth Hospitals University FT said: “Our emergency department remains full with patients and we have very limited space to treat emergency patients. We are only able to treat patients with life-threatening conditions and injuries, so anyone patients who arrive at ED without a life-threatening condition or injury, will be redirected to alternative services that can help... “Our immediate priority is to ensure there are beds available to admit our most seriously ill patients into and we are focusing on safely discharging as many patients as possible. We ask that families and loved ones support us with this and collect patients as soon as they are ready to be discharged.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 11 July 2022
  17. News Article
    Hospital leaders say they have been pressured to deliver more ‘corridor care’ as a result of efforts to ease the ambulance handover crisis. Due to the collapse in ambulance response times over the last year, hospitals have been told to receive patients from ambulance crews more quickly, to enable those crews to respond to new incidents in the community. This can mean patients being kept on trolley beds in corridors, with a lack of appropriate staff to care for them. Tracy Bullock, chief executive of University Hospitals of North Midlands, told HSJ her trust almost eradicated “corridor care” before the pandemic. But she added: “There have been discussions about going back to corridor care, but we have resisted that, as it brought significant patient safety and staff wellbeing issues… although these never received the same airtime as ambulance waits as they are unseen and only impact on the acutes. “The terminology has now changed and instead of corridor care it’s ‘cohorting’, and the space is not necessarily a corridor but a designated space for ambulances to drop more patients off.” She said this only works with enough staff, “otherwise you end up with the same safety issues that we had delivering corridor care pre-pandemic”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 11 July 2022
  18. News Article
    The NHS will have to cut investment in cancer care if ministers award frontline staff a pay rise above 3% but refuse to provide extra money to cover it, health service bosses have warned. The NHS England chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, and Julian Kelly, its chief financial officer, made clear their belief that soaring inflation means the service’s 1.3 million staff deserve a pay award of more than the 3% the government has already given the organisation funding to cover. But they warned that any increase above that would force it to cut services, including primary care and the planned new nationwide network of centres intended to diagnose killer diseases early – unless the Treasury covers the cost of the higher amount. If ministers do award staff more, then the 3% originally planned “we would then be looking at having to … cut back on investment in our major areas, when our major areas are primary care, cancer care, or indeed at the margin … some big capital investments. In fact we were just talking about the diagnostic centres [intended to spot cancer and other illnesses sooner]", said Kelly. “[A] pay settlement higher than 3% and no extra money would entail some really difficult decisions.” It is “not realistic” to expect the NHS to absorb any extra costs, he added. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 7 July 2022
  19. News Article
    NHS England has set trusts and systems a ‘100-day challenge’ to discharge more patients from hospital and free up beds before winter. David Sloman, chief operating officer of NHSE, has asked leaders of integrated care boards, acute and community trusts in a letter sent last week to adopt 10 “best practice initiatives” which he said “can make a significant difference in facilitating discharge and improving care for patients”. Trusts and systems have been given until 30 September to have a “full understanding” of the initiatives (listed below) and “infrastructure in place” to implement them. The initiatives include setting expected dates of discharge for patients within 48 hours of admission, “apply seven-day working” to discharge more patients at weekends, treat delayed discharge as “a potential harm event” and to manage workforces in community and social care services “to better match predicted patterns in demand”. Sir David has told regional and local leaders that a dedicated national NHSE team will set up “launch meetings” in each system, which will ensure there is “a focus on improving processes and performance around discharge”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 5 July 2022
  20. News Article
    More than 10,000 people are waiting three months or longer following an urgent referral for suspected cancer, internal NHS data seen by HSJ reveals. Patients with suspected cancer are not supposed to wait more than two months from a referral. However, information shared with HSJ shows that of the 313,000 people on the national cancer waiting list, just over 10,000 had waited 104 days or more. Information about three-month cancer waits is not made public on a regular basis. NHS England publishes data for the total backlog of patients waiting over 62 days, but does not make public the regional or trust-level results, or reveal how many patients are waiting three months or more. One senior figure in cancer policy told HSJ the backlog position was “awful” and “a reflection of a worsening trajectory overwhelming diagnostic capacity in particular”. Breast, skin and lower gastro-intestinal cancers saw the biggest increases in long waiters. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 5 July 2022
  21. News Article
    NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) which supplies blood to hospitals is reporting severe supply shortages for the first time since 2018, HSJ has learned. Well-placed senior sources said it is close to issuing a formal “amber alert”, which would mean it could not guarantee blood supplies to hospitals, they said. NHSBT acknowledged to HSJ that it was “expecting a difficult few months”. NHS trusts would have to start cancelling elective operations if they cannot ensure that necessary bloods are available. NHSBT has already written to trusts asking them not to over-order supplies, and to ensure management plans are in place should the situation escalate. Supplies of the common O blood types are thought to be down to less than three days’ worth. If they were to drop to two days, this would trigger an amber alert. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 5 July 2022
  22. News Article
    An 18-year-old woman suffering a mental health crisis was forced to wait eight-and-a-half days in A&E before getting a bed in a psychiatric hospital – believed to be the longest such wait seen in the NHS. Louise (not her real name) had to be looked after by the police and security guards and sleep in a chair and on a mattress of the floor in the A&E at St Helier hospital in Sutton, south London, because no bed was available in a mental health facility. She became increasingly “dejected, despairing and desperate” as her ordeal continued and, her mental health worsening while she waited, self-harmed by banging her head off a wall. She absconded twice because she did not know when she would finally start inpatient treatment. Louise arrived at St Helier on the evening of Thursday 16 June and did not get a bed in an NHS psychiatric unit until the early hours of Saturday 25 June, more than eight days later. She was diagnosed last year with emotionally unstable personality disorder and ADHD. The mental health charity Mind said it believed it to be the longest wait in A&E ever endured by someone experiencing a mental health crisis, and described it as “unacceptable, disgraceful and dangerous”. It called for urgent action to tackle the inadequacy of NHS mental health provision and bed numbers. “An eight-and-a-half day wait in A&E for a mental health bed is both unacceptable and disgraceful. Mind has never heard of a patient in crisis waiting this long to receive the care they need, and serious questions need to be raised as to how anyone – let alone an 18-year-old – was left to suffer for so long without the care she needs,” said Rheian Davies, the head of Mind’s legal unit. “This is dangerous for staff, who are not trained to give the acute care the patient needs, and dangerous for the patient, who needs that care immediately – not over a week later." Read full story Source: The Guardian, 4 July 2022
  23. News Article
    Elective activity levels are still significantly below those achieved before the pandemic, despite the high profile and government-led drive to recover services. HSJ has seen internal data which suggests raw elective activity levels from the start of April to mid-June have averaged around 88% of that recorded in the same period during 2019-20. This is despite the NHS aiming to deliver activity levels of at least 110% above the pre-covid benchmark in 2022-23, in its attempt to make inroads into record elective care waiting lists. According to senior and well-placed sources, the continued low activity levels have sparked discussions within NHSE about easing or resetting the expectations for the year. It had been hoped that increased activity from May onwards would start to drive down the waiting list – or at least slow its growth. However, the data obtained by HSJ suggests activity levels continue to disappoint. Sources pointed to repeated covid waves and related pressures through the spring, saying this has hampered efforts to ramp up activity. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 July 2022
  24. News Article
    The shortage of GPs in England is set to become worse, with more than one in four posts predicted to be vacant within a decade, an analysis suggests. The Health Foundation study said the current 4,200 shortfall could rise to more than 10,000 by 2030-31. The think tank believes the government will struggle to increase the number of GPs, while demand will continue to rise - creating a bigger shortfall. The government has promised to recruit 6,000 extra GPs by 2024, but ministers have admitted they are struggling to achieve that. The analysis said the numbers entering the profession are on the rise, but this will be offset by GPs retiring or moving towards part-time working, according to current trends. The worst-case scenarios suggested more than half of GP posts could even be vacant. Anita Charlesworth, director of research at the Health Foundation, said: "It's sobering that over the next decade things are set to get worse, not better." "It's critical that government takes action to protect general practice and avoid it getting locked in a vicious cycle of rising workload driving staff to leave, in turn creating more pressure on remaining staff and fuelling even more departures." Prof Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said the predictions were "bleak" and the worst-case scenario would be a "disaster". "Our members have told us they lack the time to deliver the care that they want to deliver for patients - and that patients need," he said. Read full story Source: BBC News, 30 June 2022
  25. News Article
    Rapidly falling continuity of care levels pose an “existential threat” to patient safety, Britain’s top family doctor will warn today as research reveals only half of Britons regularly see the same GP. Prof Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), will say trusted relationships between family doctors and patients are the most “powerful intervention” for delivering effective, high-quality care as they boost patient satisfaction and health outcomes, and reduce use of hospital services. But in a keynote speech to the college’s annual conference, Marshall will warn that continuity of care is becoming almost impossible to deliver on the NHS amid soaring demand and shrinking numbers of GPs, in what he will describe as the “most worrying crisis in decades”. There are mounting concerns over the ability of the NHS to tackle record waiting lists, with 6.5m patients awaiting care in England alone. Earlier this month Sajid Javid, the health secretary, admitted the current model of GP care “is not working” but insisted there would be no more money for the health service. At the RCGP conference in London, Marshall will tell delegates that because of rising workloads and fewer staff, GPs no longer have the time to properly assess patients, with 65% warning safety is being compromised due to appointments being too short, according to a recent survey commissioned by the college. Only 39% of respondents said they were able to deliver the continuity of care their patients need – down from 60% two years ago. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 29 June 2022
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