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  1. News Article
    The Health and Social Care Committee examines the Government’s progress against its pledges on the health and social care workforce and will be the focus of a new independent evaluation by the Health and Social Care Committee’s Expert Panel. Professor Dame Jane Dacre, Chair of the Expert Panel, said: “We’ll be looking at commitments the Government has made on workforce – the people who deliver the health and social care services we rely on. “We’ve identified a recurrent theme in our evaluations to date – whether in maternity, cancer or mental health services, progress is dependent on having the right number of skilled staff in the right place at the right time. Shortages have a real impact on the delivery of services and undermine achievements. “Our panel of experts will evaluate progress made to meet policy pledges in this crucial area - whether it’s about getting workforce planning right, training, or ensuring staff well-being.” The Expert Panel will focus on three areas: Planning for the workforce – including how targets are set, recruitment, and retention. Building a skilled workforce – including incorporating technology and professional development of staff. Wellbeing at work – including support services for staff, and reducing bullying rates. Four specialists have been appointed for this evaluation, bringing their subject specific expertise and experience. They will work alongside the core members of the Expert Panel in identifying a set of Government commitments on workforce and evaluate progress made against them. The findings will support the work of the Health and Social Care Committee which is carrying out a separate inquiry: Workforce: recruitment, training and retention in health and social care. Read full story Source: UK Parliament, 20 April 2022
  2. News Article
    Despite workforce being the biggest challenge facing the health service, the Health and Care Bill provides no clarity on the numbers of staff this country needs, says Andrew Goddard in a HSJ article. The Health and Care Bill returned to the Commons this week – as did the question of workforce planning. At the end of the spring term, MPs voted to reject an amendment to the bill which would have required the secretary of state to publish independent assessments of current and future workforce numbers every few years. The following week, the House of Lords – led by Baroness Cumberlege, with support from Baroness Harding, Lord Stevens of Birmingham and other cross-party peers – voted to put a revised version of the amendment back in. This particular game of ping pong about how we should plan the NHS and social care workforce is an important one. Workforce is not only a blindspot in the bill – it is a blindspot in the government’s ambitions for health and care. A lack of staff risks undermining the true potential of the Health and Social Care Levy because there will be too few staff to carry out the additional checks and diagnostic procedures promised. The new diagnostic hubs are to be staffed with existing NHS colleagues. Workforce shortages hampered our response to the pandemic and are already having a significant impact on our response to the backlog. They were also identified in the Ockenden Report as a driving factor in the avoidable deaths of 201 babies. It is concerning then, that despite workforce being the biggest challenge facing the health service, the Health and Care Bill provides no clarity on the numbers of staff this country needs. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 22 April 2022
  3. News Article
    The NHS is falling behind in the race to tackle antibiotic-resistant infections, with the service set to miss two key targets. As part of the government’s 2019 five-year-action plan to tackle the growth in antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the NHS was set the target of reducing the number of healthcare-associated bloodstream infections of three gram-negative bacteria by 25% by March this year, and 50% by the end of March 2024. Infections caused by E. coli, pseudomonas aeruginosa and klebsiella can cause urine or wound infection, blood poisoning or pneumonia. The AMR action plan said: “In the UK, the biggest drivers of resistance [include] a rise in the incidence of infections, particularly gram-negatives.” Last week, health and social care secretary Sajd Javid stressed the continuing importance of the issue, stating that antimicrobial resistance is “one of the biggest health threats facing the world”. Analysis by HSJ has shown there has been only a small decline in the numbers of cases involving the three bacteria since monitoring started. The baseline for measuring the reduction was 2016-17, when there were 23,037 healthcare associated infections related to the bacteria. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 21 April 2022
  4. News Article
    A hospital for adults with eating disorders has been rated inadequate after inspectors found the provision of food was "unsafe and unacceptable". A Care Quality Commission (CQC) report of the Schoen Clinic in York said some patients were given mouldy bread and one was served food containing plastic. Concerns were also raised around lack of staff and patient safety, though wards were clean and well-equipped. Schoen Clinic Group said issues raised in the report "were quickly addressed". Following the inspection in January the hospital has been placed in special measures and will be visited again in six months. Brian Cranna, CQC's head of hospital inspection, said: "The standards of care we found at Schoen Clinic York were putting patients at risk and so we have taken urgent enforcement action, which means the service must improve if it's to retain its registration." According to the report patients were put at risk of "physical and psychological harm due to unsafe and unacceptable food provision". Read full story Source: BBC News, 21 April 2022
  5. News Article
    Patients who have “lost hope” of ever seeing a doctor are falling off NHS waiting lists due to poor record-keeping by the SNP government, Scotland’s public spending watchdog has revealed. Stephen Boyle, the auditor-general, said there was no record of patients who drop off the waiting list to go private or who simply give up. Humza Yousaf, the health secretary, said he was aware of “a small number of people” who had gone abroad for transplants, including one of his own constituents. He admitted there was no way of knowing the scale of the issue, or whether the organs were obtained legally. Boyle said: “I don’t wish to be blasé and say it is straightforward, but it really should not be an insurmountable problem to have a clear vision and strategy, reviewed and commented on, with an annual transparent plan to track progress. “The government themselves don’t have the complete data we think they should have to make some of the decisions about the delivery of health and social care services and reform.” Gillian Mackay, an SNP MSP, said some constituents told her that they have been put on a waiting list and “they hear nothing more about when they will be seen, or how they will be prioritised”. Boyle said the NHS needs to “manage patients’ expectations about how long they will have to wait”. He said: “Everybody who is waiting for services needs to have a clear expectation of when they will receive those services, whether it is [for] cancer, or other treatments on clinical prioritisation. There is clear missing part in transparency.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 19 April 2022
  6. News Article
    Thousands of people unable to work because of the effects of Long Covid are feared to be missing out on financial support, with patients struggling to access and apply for the government’s disability benefits scheme. More than 300,000 people in the UK have been left with debilitating, persistent symptoms after catching the virus – but figures show only a tiny fraction of these have successfully claimed benefits. Politicians and campaign groups warn not enough has been done to remove barriers to applying for financial aid. “A vast number of severely impaired people are simply not getting the help they need and are entitled to,” said Dr Jo House, a spokesperson for Long Covid Support, which has around 50,000 members, the majority of whom are in the UK. Jenny Ceolta-Smith, of Long Covid Support’s employment group, said there were “multiple barriers in place” when applying for the disability benefit. She said the assessment process failed to take into account the episodic and fluctuating nature of the condition. “They might be able to perform a one-off activity, but then not do so later in the day,” she said. Read full story Source: The Independent,19 April 2022
  7. News Article
    Trusts leaders can expect more emphasis on inspection ratings for individual services in future — as opposed to overall organisational ratings — the chief executive of the Care Quality Commission has said. In an interview with HSJ, Ian Trenholm discussed the future of the inspection regime, his views on prosecuting trusts, and how integrated care systems could be regulated. Asked about the future of inspections, Mr Trenholm said he did not believe trust leaders would be satisfied with just looking at their overall rating. He said: “My appeal to chief executives would be look at the broader suite of services that you’ve got in front of you. “In [the] future, I think there’ll be much more emphasis on individual ratings of individual services. Exactly what the detail will look like I think remains to be seen…” It follows questions about the accuracy of NHS acute trust ratings now, with the CQC having carried out fewer thorough inspections during the pandemic. There is now only one trust rated “inadequate”, despite huge concerns about service failings, particularly in acute care. He said the “intention over the next few months” is to create a new CQC single assessment framework which incorporates inspection findings for health systems, as well as individual providers." Read full story Source: HSJ, 19 April 2022
  8. News Article
    A clinical director and several senior managers have written to a trust CEO warning that patients are routinely waiting more than 60 hours to be admitted to a ward from accident and emergency, leaving staff “crying with frustration and anger”. In a letter to executives at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust, seen by HSJ, the managers say they lack support from the rest of the trust, and claim the emergency department at Royal Preston Hospital has a “never-ending elasticity in the eyes of others”. The letter, dated 30 March, is signed by clinical director Graham Ellis, two unit managers, the specialty business manager, and the matron. It says: “Whilst we have documented our concerns previously the current situation is worse than it has ever been…Our situation is increasingly precarious… “For the past few months we have on a regular basis had more than 50 patients waiting for a bed and that wait being in excess of 60 hours. “This means that at most times there is limited or no space to accommodate newly acutely ill patients causing ambulance handover delays of over four hours and delay in treatment.” Clinicians at Preston have been raising safety concerns about the ED for several years, but the letter is the first time concerns of senior managers have been made public. The letter references research which suggests patients die as a “direct result from long waits in ED”, and says there has been an increase in clinical incidents, pressure sores, detrimental outcomes, and occasions where patients “die without the dignity of privacy”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 April 2022
  9. News Article
    Operations are being cancelled across England as Covid causes “major disruption” inside the NHS, the country’s top surgeon has said, as doctors and health leaders say the government’s backlog targets look increasingly unachievable. Six million people are on the waiting list for NHS hospital care, including more than 23,000 who have waited more than two years. Boris Johnson said in February that he had launched “the biggest catch-up programme in the history of the health service”, but in the same month he dropped every domestic Covid restriction. Now record-high Covid rates are wreaking havoc with the ability of the NHS to catch up with surgery that was delayed or cancelled before and during the pandemic. More than 28,000 staff are off work every day due to Covid, recent figures show, while more than 20,000 patients are in hospital with Covid, which has dramatically reduced the number of beds and space available for planned surgery patients. “Unfortunately, Covid-19 continues to cause major disruption in the NHS, with high staff absences in recent weeks,” Prof Neil Mortensen, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, told the Guardian. “We have heard that planned surgery is being cancelled again in different parts of the country due to staff being off sick with the virus. This is understandably frustrating for surgical teams who want to help their patients by getting planned surgery up and running again. It’s also very distressing for patients who need a planned operation.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 14 April 2022
  10. News Article
    NHS leaders are warning that the health service is facing the "brutal reality" of an Easter as bad as most winters. Latest data shows record waits for planned surgery and in A&E, as staff plough through a backlog fuelled by Covid. The government says there is hope on the horizon. Jean Shepherd, 87, had a stroke in April last year, leaving her severely disabled and requiring round-the-clock care. At the end of February there was an outbreak of sickness at her nursing home and she needed hospital treatment. She had to wait in a wheelchair for more than 9 hours until an ambulance arrived to take her to A&E. She then spent 31 hours on a trolley between the emergency department and a secondary-care unit. "She was very distressed because she doesn't like hospitals at the best of time," says her son, Andy Shepherd. "Since the stroke, because of her cognitive ability, she doesn't understand what's happening around her." Mrs Shepherd was eventually moved to a bed in a main hospital ward, where her family says she later contracted Covid, before recovering and being discharged back to her care home two weeks later. "I appreciate that A&E departments have always been busy, but I just wasn't prepared for what greeted me at the hospital," says her son. "There were patients on ambulance trolleys literally everywhere and the staff were absolutely rushed off their feet. I remember thinking at the time that this is not sustainable." Read full story Source: BBC News, 14 April 2022
  11. News Article
    Mums who have given birth at Sheffield's largest maternity unit have revealed all about the "horrible" conditions, with some parents saying they feared for their baby's lives. One mum - a midwife herself - was so concerned about her unborn baby's welfare that she and her partner temporarily moved to London just weeks before her due date. "I felt like my son and I might have died if we had the pregnancy in Sheffield," she said. Several mums have spoken to Yorkshire Live about their stories after a scathing report uncovered the scale of the issues on the Jessop Wing. CQC inspectors highlighted all manner of major issues about the care given at Sheffield Teaching Hospital's specialist maternity unit, including examples of emergency help not arriving when staff called for it. Distraught mums said they were left naked and covered in bodily fluids while others complained about being ignored for hours despite begging for pain relief. Dangerously low staffing levels exposed patients to the risk of serious harm, while midwives themselves revealed a toxic environment of a "bullying and intimidating culture" from senior management. As a Trust spokesperson said "we are very sorry" and vowed to make big improvements, we spoke to some of the families worst affected by the problems as they explained how "basic dignity and care have gone out the window". Read full story Source: 12, April 2022, Yorkshire Live
  12. News Article
    Ministers should reconsider England’s “living with Covid” plans, health leaders have said, while accusing the government of ignoring the ongoing threat for ideological reasons. The NHS Confederation, which represents organisations across the healthcare sector, has accused No 10 of having “abandoned any interest” in the pandemic, despite a new Omicron surge putting pressure on an already overstretched NHS. “The brutal reality for staff and patients is that this Easter in the NHS is as bad as any winter,” said Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation. "We do not have a living-with-Covid plan, we have a living-without-restrictions ideology. “But instead of the understanding and support NHS staff received during 2020 and 2021, we have a government that seems to want to wash its hands of responsibility for what is occurring in plain sight in local services up and down the country. No 10 has seemingly abandoned any interest in Covid whatsoever. “NHS leaders and their teams feel abandoned by the government and they deserve better.” Taylor later told BBC Breakfast: “In our view, we do not have a ‘living with Covid’ plan, we have a ‘living without restrictions’ ideology, which is different. We need to put in place the measures that are necessary to try to alleviate the pressures on our health service while this virus continues to affect [it].” Read full story Source: BBC News, 11 April 2022
  13. News Article
    Two years ago the first wave of the covid pandemic reached its peak. The NHS had reacted with impressive speed to prepare for an influx of patients with an infectious disease that few knew much about, had no cure for, and for which there was no known vaccine. However, now the NHS goes into the Easter break in a more fragile state than in any previous winter since, at least, the 1990s. This is not just the direct result of covid hospitalisation, of course – although the distracting narrative of ‘with rather than because of covid’ has obscured how hugely damaging any kind of infectious disease that is as widespread in the community as covid is now can be to effective hospital care. For someone who has just undergone an operation, for example, the greatest threat is not from catching covid itself, but from the impact the virus may have on how quickly their wound may heal. Perhaps covid’s greatest continuing impact is on growing staff absences and the pernicious impact it is having on the long-term health of those who had the disease – even in some cases where it has been relatively mild. For the tens of thousands who have been hospitalised with covid, the consequences for their long-term health look more serious every day. Much of this new workload is ending up at the doors of primary and community care – and displacing other needs and services just when they are most required after two years of coping with the pandemic. There is usually one thing you can confidently say about the NHS, which is that in any crisis it will make sure the life-saving decisions are made on time. However, in the South West, and probably other regions too, that is not happening. People are dying because the NHS cannot – despite its best efforts – save them. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 8 April 2022
  14. News Article
    Health leaders ‘pay lip service’ to engaging with patients and "do not look like or live the lives of the people they are making decisions about", an NHS England director has said. Olivia Butterworth, NHSE’s deputy director of people and communities, told a public event hosted by the New Local think tank there is a “whole load of work” going on around reforming patient-reported outcome measures. But she said that “none” of this work “starts with conversations with people about what do they value and what they want to measure.” Asked whether NHS England’s top leadership is “paying lip service” to patient engagement, Ms Butterworth said: “I think often everybody pays lip service to it. We all use the right words. But whether it’s local government, whether it’s the NHS we know the words to use, but do we really live that in our actions in the way that we really like to change things? “Or do we just blame the system for being too complex and it is the system that won’t let us, without recognising that we are the system, we make the system, we run the system, the system is people.” Elsewhere in the session, Ms Butterworth said that “our decision makers do not look like or live the lives of the people they are making decisions about.” She added that health services need to “join up around people” and that integrated care systems and partnerships offer the opportunity to “cut the crap of the organisational boundaries that stopped us doing things”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 8 April 2022
  15. News Article
    The healthcare regulator has been branded “not fit for purpose” after dismissing warnings of the biggest maternity scandal in NHS history, The Telegraph can reveal. Letters seen by this newspaper show that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) told grieving parents it would not support an independent inquiry into baby deaths, just months before such an investigation was ordered. Rhiannon Davies wrote to the watchdog in Dec 2016, alerting the regulator to 19 avoidable deaths of mothers and babies at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, as well as a string of cases where lives were put at risk. However, the head of the CQC at the time assured Ms Davies that the culture was “changing for the positive”, rebuffing her calls for an independent inquiry. Ms Davies had provided the watchdog with details of a string of deaths, which she and fellow bereaved parents had found from publicly available information. The information was contained in a letter to Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary at the time, and shared with the regulator, setting out why families believed an inquiry was required. On Tuesday night, Ms Davies said that the refusal of the CQC to back an investigation, and the false assurances given by its most senior figure, showed how it “never scratched beneath the surface” despite death after death. Ms Davies said that she had “absolutely no faith” in its current ability to regulate and spot future scandals, saying it had “pushed back” every effort made by families to expose the failings at Shrewsbury. “They are not fit for purpose because we cannot trust them to be doing their job properly,” she told The Telegraph. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Telegraph, 5 April 2022
  16. News Article
    Dozens of families have written to the government expressing concern over a review into failing maternity units in Nottingham. A probe into Nottingham University Hospitals Trust is under way after dozens of babies died or were injured. But families say the review is "moving with the viscosity of treacle". They have called for Donna Ockenden, who led the inquiry into the UK's biggest maternity scandal, to take charge of a review. In a letter to Health Secretary Sajid Javid, a group of 100 people raised concerns with the current thematic review, which has been commissioned by the local clinical commissioning group (CCG) and NHS England, and NHS Improvement. According to the CCG, the review will look at themes and trends and put in "place detailed and measurable actions so improvements can be made fast". But families have questioned the independence of the review and the experience of the team to handle a probe of this magnitude. It is chaired by Cathy Purt, a long-time NHS manager who the families believe has no experience of running complex inquiries or maternity services. The letter states: "If families are to be safeguarded, real intervention is required." Read full story Source: BBC News, 7 April 2022
  17. News Article
    Long waiting times at Devon’s acute hospitals have forced commissioners to offer patients treatment 200 miles away in London in a bid to reduce the elective backlog. Devon Clinical Commissioning Group has secured extra capacity for patients requiring complex orthopaedic surgery under a new deal with the South West London Elective Orthopaedic Centre, located at Epsom General Hospital. The NHS-run orthopaedic centre is around 170 miles from Exeter in east Devon and 210 miles from Plymouth in west Devon. Many patients have declined to go, despite the CCG offering to cover their travel costs. It is the longest publicly reported distance patients are being sent for elective treatment in the NHS, with patients usually referred to neighbouring hospitals or integrated care systems if there is no capacity at their local provider. Nearly 1,500 patients in the Devon ICS have waited longer than two years for treatment. The latest national data for England showed nearly 23,000 patients had been waiting longer than two years in January. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 8 April 2022
  18. News Article
    Emma Moore felt cornered. At a community health clinic in Portland, Oregon, USA, the 29-year-old nurse practitioner said she felt overwhelmed and undertrained. Coronavirus patients flooded the clinic for two years, and Moore struggled to keep up. Then the stakes became clear. On 25 March, about 2,400 miles away in a Tennessee courtroom, former nurse RaDonda Vaught was convicted of two felonies and facing eight years in prison for a fatal medication mistake. Like many nurses, Moore wondered if that could be her. She'd made medication errors before, although none so grievous. But what about the next one? In the pressure cooker of pandemic-era health care, another mistake felt inevitable. Four days after Vaught's verdict, Moore quit. She said Vaught's verdict contributed to her decision. "It's not worth the possibility or the likelihood that this will happen," Moore said, "if I'm in a situation where I'm set up to fail." In the wake of Vaught's trial ― an extremely rare case of a health care worker being criminally prosecuted for a medical error ― nurses and nursing organizations have condemned the verdict through tens of thousands of social media posts, shares, comments, and videos. They warn that the fallout will ripple through their profession, demoralizing and depleting the ranks of nurses already stretched thin by the pandemic. Ultimately, they say, it will worsen health care for all. Read full story Source: Kaiser Health News, 5 April 2022
  19. News Article
    Senior medics have reacted in horror to NHS England’s decision to ‘dramatically’ cut the funding of a key long-term plan commitment designed to improve older people’s community services and deliver more care at home. British Geriatrics Society president Jennifer Burns told HSJ the professional body was “horrified” that the budget for the Ageing Well programme for 2022-23 would be £70m instead of the £204m originally promised in the long-term plan for the NHS. “We are dismayed that the promised funding for the Ageing Well programme as set out in the NHS long-term plan is being so dramatically cut at this time,” Dr Burns said. NHSE said: “The NHS is also investing an additional £200m in funding for virtual wards across the country by March 2023, delivering more care to patients safely in the comfort of their own home which will directly benefit older patients.” But Dr Burns said that although virtual wards would go “some way to helping with hospital admissions”, they were “no substitute” for the original commitments. “Older people suffered a devastating toll during the pandemic. Now is the time for systems to ensure the right services are in place and there is sustainable planning for the healthcare needs of an ageing population.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 7 April 2022
  20. News Article
    The national supply chain agency will bring management of significant areas of NHS spend in-house on a permanent basis in a major overhaul of its operating model, HSJ has been told. NHS Supply Chain’s current operating model, which has existed since 2018, has outsourced day-to-day management of the procurement of most of the goods and services bought by trusts as part of the “category towers” structure. Under this structure, 11 category towers each cover a different spend area with a service provider to manage the available products and services. But, in an exclusive interview, NHSSC chief Andrew New said the 11 categories would be reduced to eight. Three of the new categories — personal protective equipment, “medical capital” (which combines large capital diagnostics equipment with smaller scale diagnostics, pathology and point of care testing categories) and “medical clinically complex” surgical products and services — would be managed in-house. The new model will come into effect in 2023-24 following a procurement process to find new suppliers for the revamped category structure, which starts on 11 April 2022 with the publication of the contract notice. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 April 2022
  21. News Article
    Patients in nine hospitals in Ireland were often treated in the wrong places, sometimes corridors, in situations where it was “unclear” who was supposed to be providing their care, a clinical review has found. It warned of the potential for people to receive inappropriate specialist input and recommended specific wards be used to avoid so-called “safari rounds” where consultants must seek out scattered patients. The independent review team consisted of clinical and management experts from Scotland and England who undertook a programme of visits between August and November, 2019. “The review team witnessed widespread boarding and outliers – any bed, anytime, anywhere and including mixed gender,” the document said. “This does not create extra capacity, leads to safari rounds, increases length of stay, introduces harm by non-specialist care and increases staff absenteeism.” Although acknowledging often excellent work by staff, the report was commissioned to examine non-scheduled care at nine hospitals found to be “under the greatest pressures” during the winter season of 2018/2019. These had “significant numbers” of patients waiting for long periods on trolleys. Read full story Source: The Irish Times, 4 April 2022
  22. News Article
    Children and young people who are anxious, depressed or are self-harming are being denied help from swamped NHS child and adolescent mental health services, GPs have revealed. Even under-18s with an eating disorder or psychosis are being refused care by overstretched CAMHS services, which insist that they are not sick enough to warrant treatment. In one case, a crisis CAMHS team in Wales would not immediately assess the mental health of an actively suicidal child who had been stopped from jumping off a building earlier the same day unless the GP made a written referral. In another, a CAMHS service in eastern England declined to take on a 12-year-old boy found with a ligature in his room because the lack of any marks on his neck meant its referral criteria had not been met. The shocking state of CAMHS care is laid bare in a survey for the youth mental health charity stem4 of 1,001 GPs across the UK who have sought urgent help for under-18s who are struggling mentally. CAMHS teams, already unable to cope with the rising need for treatment before Covid struck, have become even more overloaded because of the pandemic’s impact on youth mental health. Mental health experts say young people’s widespread inability to access CAMHS care is leading to their already fragile mental health deteriorating even further and then self-harming, dropping out of school, feeling uncared for and having to seek help at A&E. “As a clinician it is particularly worrying that children and young people with psychosis, eating disorders and even those who have just tried to take their own life are condemned to such long waits”, said Dr Nihara Krause, a consultant clinical psychologist who specialises in treating children and young people and who is the founder of stem4. “It is truly shocking to learn from this survey of GPs’ experiences of dealing with CAMHS services that so many vulnerable young people in desperate need of urgent help with their mental health are being forced to wait for so long – up to two years – for care they need immediately. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 April 2022
  23. News Article
    Patients visiting Wales' newest emergency department were likely to have been put at risk of harm due to the lack of processes and systems in place, inspectors found. Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) carried out an unannounced inspection of The Grange University Hospital in Cwmbran between 1 and 3 November last year and published its findings on 29 March. On the day of their arrival inspectors said The Grange was at full capacity with no empty beds in A&E or in the hospital in general. Despite the best efforts of staff who were "working hard under pressure" the report stated the emergency department had several issues which could have compromised the privacy and dignity of patients. This included problems with the physical environment of the waiting room, which was described as a "major cause of anxiety" for visitors, as well as with the flow of patients through the hospital in general. It found that patients were not triaged and medically managed in A&E in a timely fashion with many being placed on uncomfortable chairs or in corridors for hours on end. Between 1 April 2021 and 1 November 2021, the average waiting time in the department was six hours and seven minutes. The report said some issues required immediate action including the fact patients in the waiting area were often left to "deteriorate without being overseen". There were also infection control failures which could have led to the cross-contamination of Covid-19. "We were not assured that all the processes and systems in place were sufficient to ensure that patients consistently received an acceptable standard of safe and effective care," the report stated. Read full story Source: Wales Online, 1 April 2022
  24. News Article
    Poor culture and leadership must be addressed if we are to make our maternity services the safest place to give birth. This statement from the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) came as the final report of the largest ever review of NHS maternity services was published. The RCM acknowledged that the pain and suffering of the families had been worsened by having to fight for answers and vowed to work with NHS bodies and other professional organisations to ensure lessons are learned from these tragic failings. Today the RCM has pledged to continue its work to be part of the solution to safety improvements and support its members to do the same not only at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust, but throughout all maternity services across the UK. Commenting, the Royal College of Midwives’ (RCM) Chief Executive, Gill Walton said: “It is heartbreaking that this report only came about because of the determination of the families. We owe them a debt that I fear can never be repaid. What we can do - all of us who are involved in maternity services – is work together to ensure we listen, and we learn from this and ensure that women and families have trust in their care." “This review must be a turning point for all those working in maternity services. The actions recommended are measured and sensible and reflect much of what the RCM has been calling for. We hope that those in a position to enact them – NHS England and the Department for Health & Social Care – will do so in partnership with organisations like ours and with haste.” "A poor working culture, where staff were afraid to raise concerns, has been cited by the report as a key factor in many of the cases. Earlier this year the RCM called for a seismic NHS cultural shift to improve maternity safety as it published guidance for its members to raise concerns about maternity care which outlined steps staff can take and what to do if they feel they are not being listened to or their concerns are ignored." Read full story Source: Royal College of Midwives, 30 March 2022
  25. News Article
    Less than half of staff at scandal-hit Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust feel they can speak up about concerns, according to a staff survey, as a damning report warned serious problems persist in maternity care. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust is one of the worst-performing trusts on the latest national survey of staff for the NHS. It comes after Donna Ockenden, who chaired a review into maternity failures at the trust, said her “biggest concern” was that staff had been told not to share concerns with her inquiry. Ms Ockenden told The Independent her biggest concern was “that ordinary staff on the ground are telling me they were advised not to cooperate with the Ockenden review”. The NHS staff survey, published on Wednesday, showed just 49% of staff at the trust reported they would feel safe enough speaking up about concerns in 2021 – down from 53% in 2020. Meanwhile, just 34% of staff said they feel their concerns would be addressed if there were to speak up. The trust is one of the worst three hospital trusts in the country when it comes to rising care concerns, the figures show. Only United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust and Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust performed worse. Read full story Source: The Independent, 31 March 2022
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