Jump to content

Search the hub

Showing results for tags 'Organisation / service factors'.

More search options

  • Search By Tags

    Start to type the tag you want to use, then select from the list.

  • Search By Author

Content Type


Forums

  • All
    • Commissioning, service provision and innovation in health and care
    • Coronavirus (COVID-19)
    • Culture
    • Improving patient safety
    • Investigations, risk management and legal issues
    • Leadership for patient safety
    • Organisations linked to patient safety (UK and beyond)
    • Patient engagement
    • Patient safety in health and care
    • Patient Safety Learning
    • Professionalising patient safety
    • Research, data and insight
    • Miscellaneous

Categories

  • Commissioning, service provision and innovation in health and care
    • Commissioning and funding patient safety
    • Digital health and care service provision
    • Health records and plans
    • Innovation programmes in health and care
    • Climate change/sustainability
  • Coronavirus (COVID-19)
    • Blogs
    • Data, research and statistics
    • Frontline insights during the pandemic
    • Good practice and useful resources
    • Guidance
    • Mental health
    • Exit strategies
    • Patient recovery
    • Questions around Government governance
  • Culture
    • Bullying and fear
    • Good practice
    • Occupational health and safety
    • Safety culture programmes
    • Second victim
    • Speak Up Guardians
    • Staff safety
    • Whistle blowing
  • Improving patient safety
    • Clinical governance and audits
    • Design for safety
    • Disasters averted/near misses
    • Equipment and facilities
    • Error traps
    • Health inequalities
    • Human factors (improving human performance in care delivery)
    • Improving systems of care
    • Implementation of improvements
    • International development and humanitarian
    • Safety stories
    • Stories from the front line
    • Workforce and resources
  • Investigations, risk management and legal issues
    • Investigations and complaints
    • Risk management and legal issues
  • Leadership for patient safety
    • Business case for patient safety
    • Boards
    • Clinical leadership
    • Exec teams
    • Inquiries
    • International reports
    • National/Governmental
    • Patient Safety Commissioner
    • Quality and safety reports
    • Techniques
    • Other
  • Organisations linked to patient safety (UK and beyond)
    • Government and ALB direction and guidance
    • International patient safety
    • Regulators and their regulations
  • Patient engagement
    • Consent and privacy
    • Harmed care patient pathways/post-incident pathways
    • How to engage for patient safety
    • Keeping patients safe
    • Patient-centred care
    • Patient Safety Partners
    • Patient stories
  • Patient safety in health and care
    • Care settings
    • Conditions
    • Diagnosis
    • High risk areas
    • Learning disabilities
    • Medication
    • Mental health
    • Men's health
    • Patient management
    • Social care
    • Transitions of care
    • Women's health
  • Patient Safety Learning
    • Patient Safety Learning campaigns
    • Patient Safety Learning documents
    • Patient Safety Standards
    • 2-minute Tuesdays
    • Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference 2019
    • Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference 2018
    • Patient Safety Learning Awards 2019
    • Patient Safety Learning Interviews
    • Patient Safety Learning webinars
  • Professionalising patient safety
    • Accreditation for patient safety
    • Competency framework
    • Medical students
    • Patient safety standards
    • Training & education
  • Research, data and insight
    • Data and insight
    • Research
  • Miscellaneous

News

  • News

Find results in...

Find results that contain...


Date Created

  • Start
    End

Last updated

  • Start
    End

Filter by number of...

Joined

  • Start

    End

Group

First name

Last name

Country

Join a private group (if appropriate)

About me

Organisation

Role

Found 1,519 results
  1. News Article
    England’s mental health inpatient system is “running very hot” and operating well above recommended occupancy levels, HSJ has been told, as new funding to address the problem is revealed. The move was announced by NHS England mental health director Claire Murdoch in an exclusive interview with HSJ. It comes amid a steep rise in mental health patients waiting more than 12 hours in accident and emergency. Last month, an HSJ investigation revealed 12-hour waits for people in crisis had ballooned by 150% in 2022 compared to pre-pandemic levels. Problems finding specialist beds have been cited by experts as one of the root causes of A&E breaches. Ms Murdoch told HSJ the funds would not come from ”within the mental health service budget” and that they would be used to “help address any pressures where we think the answer is more of either beds or other urgent and emergency care which has a capital need.” NHSE is now working with the 42 integrated care systems to determine where the money can best be used. Ms Murdoch said the money would be spent ”where there is a particular need” and that there was “no blanket approach” to its allocation. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 10 August 2022
  2. News Article
    Action rather than reports is needed to tackle healthcare inequalities faced by black people in Birmingham, a charity says. It follows a report which found people from black communities continued to face racism and discrimination when accessing treatment. The city's director of public health said he was "horrified" by the finding. Dr Justin Varney said the system must be adapted to meet the needs of all. Charity The First Class Foundation wants to see implementation of changes and says among the healthcare problems in need of tackling are "microaggressions" faced by communities. The publication of the Birmingham and Lewisham African Health Inequalities Review followed an 18-month study commissioned by the areas' local authorities. It found disadvantages among the communities in housing, pollution and availability of green space had "all contributed to worse health". The report additionally highlighted how the communities were "exposed to structural racism and discrimination which leads to... chronic stress and trauma". Read full story Source: BBC News, 10 August 2022
  3. News Article
    The Senate passed a sweeping budget package Sunday intended to bring financial relief to Americans, but not before Republican senators voted to strip a proposal that would have capped the price of insulin at $35 per month for many patients. A proposal that limits the monthly cost of insulin to $35 for Medicare patients was left untouched. But using a parliamentary rule, GOP lawmakers were able to jettison the part of the proposal that would apply to privately insured patients. Lowering the price of drugs such as insulin, which is used by diabetics to manage their blood sugar levels, is broadly popular with voters, polling shows. Senate Democrats denounced Republicans for voting against relief for Americans struggling to pay for the lifesaving drug. More than 30 million Americans have diabetes, and about 7 million require insulin daily to manage their blood sugar levels. The insulin price cap, part of a larger package of proposals to cut prescription drug and other health-care costs, was intended to limit out-of-pocket monthly insulin costs to $35 for most Americans who use insulin. More than 1 in 5 insulin users on private medical insurance pay more than $35 per month for the medicine, according to a recent analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The same analysis found that the median monthly savings for those people would range from $19 to $27, depending on their type of insurance market. A Yale University study found insulin is an “extreme financial burden” for more than 14% of Americans who use it. These people are spending more than 40% of their income after food and housing costs on the medicine. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Washington Post, 8 August 2022
  4. News Article
    Patients at trusts with long waiting lists should no longer think ‘they have to go to their local hospital’ for outpatient appointments, but should instead be offered virtual consultations elsewhere in the country where there is greater capacity, Sir Jim Mackey has told HSJ. The NHS England elective chief said recent efforts to abolish two-year waiters by July had meant a “very big” surgical focus. However, the next phase of the elective recovery plan would see a major shift of emphasis onto reducing the wait for outpatient appointments. Sir Jim said: “Providers have been split into tiers again with tier one having national oversight and tier two, regional oversight. Behind that we will be pairing up organisations so that organisations with capacity can help those with the biggest challenges from a virtual outpatient perspective. He added: “There still is a lot to work through [on virtual outpatients], we’re going to be testing the concept… We need to work through how all the wiring and plumbing needs to work. For example, what happens if the patient needs a diagnostic locally, having seen a clinician virtually in another part of the country? “It would be great also to try and stimulate more of a consumer drive on this – encouraging patients to ask about virtual outpatients when the waits locally may be too long, so they don’t just think they have to go to their local hospital. I think this could really help shift the model if we can get it right.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 9 August 2022
  5. News Article
    NHS patients will wait longer for routine checks as part of a national drive to clear record backlogs. Health officials have instructed hospitals to “repurpose” resources to focus on those waiting the longest, who are yet to have their first appointment. Today the NHS claimed it had “virtually eliminated” two year waits, with less than 3,000 people enduring such delays, down from 22,500 at the end of January. Hospitals are being urged to prioritise those waiting 18 months or more, with pledges to get rid of such waits by April next year. NHS chiefs have instructed hospitals to focus on outpatient first appointments, rather than patients who have already had treatment, and are waiting for follow-up checks. Senior officials have said many such appointments are a “a waste of time” saying there should be more use of systems where routine slots are scrapped, and patients instead told to contact their medical team if they have particular concerns. The drive - which health chiefs dubbed “Super September” - will see priority given to tackling the longest waits. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Telegraph, 9 August 2022
  6. News Article
    The backlog of people waiting more than two years for a routine operation in England has shrunk from 22,500 at the start of the year to fewer than 200. NHS England figures show the number of patients waiting that length of time has fallen to just 168, excluding more complex cases. Staff have been praised for carrying out the NHS elective recovery plan, published this year to tackle backlogs built up during the coronavirus pandemic. At the start of the year, more than 22,500 people had been waiting two years or longer for scans, checks and surgery. A further 51,000 who would have passed the two-year mark by the end of July have also been treated, figures show. The NHS England chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, said: “It has only been possible because the NHS has continued to reform the way we deliver care, using innovative techniques and adopting pioneering technology like robot surgery, and through building new relationships and mutual aid arrangements across systems to offer patients the opportunity to be transferred elsewhere and get the care they need as quickly as possible. “The next phase will focus on patients waiting longer than 18 months, building on the fantastic work already done, and, while it is a significant challenge, our remarkable staff have shown that, when we are given the tools and resources we need, the NHS delivers for our patients.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 9 August 2022
  7. News Article
    The number of patients unable to get a hospital appointment after being referred by their GP is up more than 50% in two years amid the record NHS backlog, official data show. NHS Digital figures show no appointments were immediately available for 2.3 million referrals made in the first six months of this year – up 51% on the same period in 2020. Appointment slot issues occur when a patient is referred by their GP through the NHS e-Referral Service but no appointment is available to book. The referral is then forwarded or deferred to a patient’s chosen provider, but if an appointment is not made within 180 days it will automatically be removed from the system, according to NHS Digital. Patient safety campaigners have said the scale of the problem must be “urgently investigated” by NHS England to ensure the safety of patients is not being compromised while they wait for appointments. Helen Hughes, the chief executive of the Patient Safety Learning charity, said: “We have significant concerns about the safety of patients who are facing increasingly long waits for treatment, particularly those on high priority cancer pathways and urgent referrals.” She said patients needed to be assured that they will “not be lost in a failing, complex system”, adding: “We believe that NHS England needs to urgently investigate, quantify the scale of the problem and take action if we are to prevent these capacity and system issues resulting in avoidable harm for patients.” Some GPs told Patient Safety Learning they had experienced difficulties getting referrals accepted. One GP, based in the North East, said: “There is an ever-creeping transfer of management of complex conditions from secondary to primary care, without adequate training or resources to manage this safely.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Telegraph, 7 August 2022 You may also be interested in Patient Safety Learning's blog: Rejected outpatient referrals are putting patients at risk and increasing workload pressure on GPs
  8. News Article
    After lockdown raided the savings of hairdresser and gym instructor Lucie Wilby, a lengthy wait for a hip replacement dealt another blow to her family’s finances. “We’re in a lot of debt because of it and that’s a combination of Covid and obviously surgery [and] waiting times,” the 53-year-old mother from Cornwall says. “If I hadn’t had to wait six months, we’d be nowhere near this issue.” Like many of the 6.6 million people on an NHS waiting list, work had become painful and eventually impossible for Wilby as the backlog in treatment forces people to cut their hours or stop employment altogether. “By the time of the operation, I was barely walking and I’m self employed,” she says. “It took about three years to get diagnosed. That’s one of the major problems – it’s not just the waiting time for the operation once you’re on the list, it’s the waiting time for diagnosis.” While tax cuts and even trans issues may have stolen the limelight in the Tory leadership race, the struggle to get a grip of record NHS backlogs post-Covid is having a huge economic, as well as human, cost. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 7 August 2022
  9. News Article
    Armed police are being sent to save the lives of people in cardiac arrest because ambulances “can’t cope” with demand, The Independent has revealed. Officers are spending up to a third of their time on non-policing matters, a watchdog has warned, including responding to mental health crises and transporting patients to A&E as ambulance services face a “chronic crisis situation”. Andy Cooke, HM chief inspector of constabulary, said that firearms officers have been responding to pleas from struggling NHS colleagues to respond to cardiac arrests. He told The Independent that police are becoming the “first, last and only resort” as NHS services buckle under strain, taking them away from tackling crime at a time when recorded offences are at a record high in England and Wales. Mr Cooke, the former chief constable of Merseyside Police, added: “Recently, officers in armed response vehicles (ARVs) were being sent to reports of people who were having cardiac arrests because the ambulance service couldn’t cope with the demand, because they’re trained in first aid and to use defibrillators." “The ambulance service contacted the police to say ‘we’ve got this heart patient and we haven’t got anyone to send’." “Being first, last and only resort, the police will go. It’s right that they did go but that hides the problems we’ve got in the rest of the system.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 8 August 2022
  10. 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
  11. News Article
    NHS England has called for a “deep dive” into local evacuation and shelter arrangements, amid ongoing concerns about outdated and unsafe estate. NHS England’s director of emergency preparedness, resilience and response Stephen Groves wrote to trusts: “Following the publication of the updated evacuation and shelter guidance for the NHS in England, and recent work driven by the heightened risk associated with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), the 2022-23 EPRR annual deep dive will focus on local evacuation and shelter arrangements.” The letter, sent at the end of last week, comes amid growing concerns about NHS estate, including RAAC planks which were used in constructing public sector buildings in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Areas to be examined in the deep dive vary by type of organisation. However, according to a self-assessment tool referenced in the letter, questions for providers include: whether they have “a process in place to triage patients in the event of an incident requiring evacuation and/or shelter of patients”; whether there are “effective arrangements in place to support partners in a community evacuation, where the population of a large area may need to be displaced”; and whether “evacuation and shelter arrangements include resilient mechanisms to communicate with staff, patients, their families and the public, pre, peri and post evacuation”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 5 August 2022
  12. News Article
    The chief executive of a trust trialling the new emergency care standards being considered by the government has called for a new six-hour target to either move patients out of accident and emergency, or for them to receive treatment. North Tees and Hartlepool Foundation Trust chief executive Julie Gillon told HSJ a new target should be set as a “body of evidence” indicates patients are at risk of deterioration following A&E waits of six hours or more. The proposal is likely to be broadly welcomed by many clinicians, but could prove controversial in some quarters. NHS England did not include a six-hour target in the bundle of new A&E metrics being piloted, and the proposal could be interpreted by some as a watered-down version of the existing four-hour standard. However, Ms Gillon cited analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine last year which revealed thousands of excess deaths resulting from overcrowding and long stays in A&Es. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 August 2022
  13. News Article
    Ministers have admitted a key NHS pledge to ensure that everyone who has been waiting at least two years for hospital care would be treated by last month has not been met. The then health secretary Sajid Javid made the promise in February when launching the NHS’s “elective recovery plan”. It was intended to tackle what is now a record 6.6 million-patient backlog in England for those awaiting a procedure such as a joint replacement or cataract removal and included a series of treatment milestones the health service had to hit. “No one will wait longer than two years by July,” Javid said. However, the Department of Health and Social Care has now admitted that it will miss that target and that “a small number of patients” will have remained untreated by that deadline. The health minister Maria Caulfield told Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, in a written parliamentary answer on 18 July that while “no formal estimate has been made … engagement with the National Health Service suggests a small number of patients with complex cases will have waited longer than two years for NHS treatment by the end of July 2022”. Streeting said the admission was a further example of the government not backing up rhetoric on the NHS with concrete action. “It is unacceptable for anyone to be left waiting more than one year for healthcare, let alone two,” he said. “Once again the Conservatives have overpromised, [and] undelivered, and patients are paying the price.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 August 2022
  14. 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
  15. News Article
    A large acute trust is carrying out a major expansion of patient-initiated follow-up (PIFU) appointments, which is said to be “the most ambitious” project of its kind in the NHS. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals Foundation Trust has categorised around half of its outpatient follow-up list as “possible or probable opportunities” for patient-initiated pathways. NNUH wants to make PIFU the “default model” for patients who are not on active pathways, and where it is safe to do this. Its project is being closely watched by national leaders and has already drawn praise from NHS England’s director of elective recovery, Rob Stones, during a webinar last month. It is understood to be more ambitious than NHSE’s official PIFU pilot projects. NHSE’s elective chief, Sir Jim Mackey, has said he wants to expand PIFU pathways on an “industrial” scale. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 29 July 2022
  16. News Article
    More than a million people – including hundreds of thousands of children – are on an unpublished national waiting list for community health services, according to NHS England documents leaked to HSJ. They reveal that just over 75,000 children are waiting to access community paediatric services, including children needing help with developmental delay, long-term health conditions and additional needs; and there is a backlog of more than 74,300 young people for speech and language therapy. More than 321,000 adults are on the list waiting for musculoskeletal services, mostly physiotherapy such as for back and joint pain; while 120,000 are waiting for podiatry. HSJ understands the lack of national support for long waits for most community and mental health care – in contrast to billions of government funding and a major recovery programme for elective consultant-led treatment – has been raised at a senior level in NHS E in recent weeks. One senior leader told HSJ the discrepancy was “immoral”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 1 August 2022
  17. News Article
    A call to NHS 111 was abandoned every 10 seconds between 2020 and 2021, figures show. Millions of callers to the helpline hung up at a time when demand for the NHS was at its highest. In 2020, 2,490,663 calls were abandoned, while in 2021 this figure increased to 3,531,186. And 1,174,159 gave up on the line from January to May this year. Callers in Devon take an average of 11 minutes to get through to the NHS 111 service, according to Liberal Democrat research. Daisy Cooper, Lib Dem spokeswoman for health and social care, said: "Ambulance services are being stretched to breaking point, hospitals are reaching full capacity and now people cannot get through to NHS 111. We have called on this government time and time again to get a grip on this issue by recruiting more NHS 111 call handlers now." "The longer they delay, the longer they are leaving people in pain and distress." Helen Hughes, of the Patient Safety Learning charity, said: "These figures represent a serious safety concern. Each call is a potential missed opportunity for patients to receive timely medical advice that may prevent future harm." "With the ongoing severe pressures faced by ambulance services and hospitals this summer, patients are increasingly being signposted to NHS 111 for advice on non-life threatening conditions." "However, it can only relieve the pressure on other areas of the health service if NHS 111 has the capacity and resources to meet rising demand. The NHS leadership needs to urgently assess the reasons for this high number of abandoned calls." Read full story Source: Express, 31 July 2022
  18. News Article
    The recent publication of the Fuller Stocktake report sets out a new vision for the role of primary care in integrated care systems. With primary care the bedrock of the NHS and at “the heart of communities”, the paper’s recommendation to similarly establish it at the centre of new ICS systems and foster greater collaboration is a welcome one that has been greeted positively in many quarters. However, a key priority underpinning many of the recommendations made is the need to create sustainable primary care for the future. Within this, there is a challenge to tackle “inadequate access to urgent care” which the report argues is having a direct impact on general practice’s ability to provide continuity of care to patients who need it most as well as overall primary care capacity. Referred to as being two sides of the same coin, this stark recognition of current workload and workforce challenges in general practice alongside their wider contributing factors is both timely and welcome. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 27 July 2022
  19. News Article
    The NHS’s only gender identity clinic for children has been found to be neither “safe nor viable” and is set to be replaced by regional hubs. A damning report into gender identity services run by the Tavistock and Portman Foundation Trust has found that the model is putting children at “considerable risk”. An interim report by Dr Hilary Cass said that children and young people are being subjected to “lengthy” waits for access to gender dysphoria services, and are not receiving support during this time. The report said a “fundamentally different” service model that can provide timely and appropriate care for children is needed, and recommended that the NHS launch local specialist centres. Her full report is due to be published next year, but has so far warned that the long waiting lists for gender-questioning children and young people are “unacceptable”. The review said it was not yet able to provide recommendations on the use of puberty blockers and feminising or masculinising hormones, due to gaps in the evidence. A report from safety watchdog the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch in April warned that CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services) had been forced to “hold the risk” while caring for children who are waiting to access specialist gender-dysphoria (GID) services. It added: “There is a lack of capacity and capability to ensure proactive risk assessment of the health of patients waiting on the GIDS waiting list.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 28 July 2022
  20. 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
  21. News Article
    Bullying and harassment allegations made against leaders of the organisation that supplies blood to the NHS have prompted a Care Quality Commission (CQC) review, with staff claiming poor culture has exacerbated the crisis around low blood stocks. HSJ has learned whistleblowers at NHS Blood and Transplant raised concerns with the CQC. As a result, the regulator has been carrying out a review of the organisation’s leadership. Several current and former staff, who wished to remain anonymous, told HSJ there are widespread concerns about the organisation’s culture, which they claim has enabled bullying and harassment from senior employees, including some racist behaviours. They said the culture has resulted in a significant number of staff being absent due to stress and anxiety, which alongside the latest wave of coronavirus, has contributed to an ongoing staffing crisis. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 28 July 2022
  22. News Article
    NHS England and the Care Quality Commission are becoming less understanding of the pressures on trusts, their leaders report, with one CEO complaining “the arrogance and bullying continues to get worse”. This is the finding of a new survey of trust chiefs, chairs and directors by NHS Providers, shared with HSJ and published in a new report on regulation today. It found two-thirds of trust leaders felt NHSE had a good understanding of “the pressures that NHS providers are facing” — down from 74% cent in a similar NHSP regulation survey in 2019, and 75% in 2018. NHSP found: “Leaders from the acute sector were much more likely to say regulators understood the pressure they were under than those from the mental health or community sectors.” One combined acute/community CEO said: “Not only have the number of requests increased but now they are coming from multiple levels, [integrated care system], regional and national.” Meanwhile, most respondents welcomed regulators’ proposed changes to their approach – for example, by the CQC to a “risk based” approach, and NHSE towards collaboration – but many indicated they did not feel these were being put into practice. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 26 July 2022
  23. News Article
    The NHS has broken its “fundamental promise” to the public that life-saving emergency care will be available when they need it, a top NHS doctor has said, as ambulances continue to lose tens of thousands of hours waiting outside hospitals. Katherine Henderson, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said that what she described as the fundamental promise of the NHS to provide an ambulance in a real emergency has been “broken”. Her comments come as the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) University NHS Trust predicted it would lose 48,000 ambulance hours waiting outside A&E departments in July. This would make it the worst month on record. In papers published on Thursday, WMAS said the impact of handover delays means that patients are waiting longer than needed for an emergency response, including patients in category one, which includes those needing immediate life-saving care. It added: “This means that patients who are immediately time-critical medical emergencies do not get the response they need and may suffer significant harm or death.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 26 July 2022
  24. News Article
    NHS England and local leaders must urgently develop a coherent ‘operating model’ for the era of integrated care systems (ICS) or see the reforms fail, leading trust chief executives have told HSJ. Despite ICSs formally launching on 1 July, the chiefs said there was still no clarity about how the service would be supported and held to account as the Health and Care Act reforms are rolled out and the stuttering Covid recovery continues. The CEOs were speaking at a roundtable to mark the publication of HSJ's annual ranking of the NHS’s “top 50 trust chief executives”. NHSE has been working on a new operating model since last year. It has confirmed it plans to keep its seven separate regional teams, and has recently indicated national programmes will be curbed as part of reductions to central staffing. Caroline Clarke, the chief executive of north London’s Royal Free group of trusts, said: “What’s unclear to me is, what the operating model is for [the] whole NHS? What is NHSE going to do… what’s expected of the regions and the ICSs… is the performance management line [for providers] going to go all the way through the ICS?” Ms Clarke said she recognised “some kind of regional infrastructure” was needed and that the existing set-up made sense in widely recognised areas such as London and other “urban” conurbations. But she added: “Are [regions] just going to be aggregating features of the NHS, or are they actually going to have a kind of intent to them?” Ms Clarke said she was “hung up” on getting an effective operating model because, without it, there was an increased chance NHSE staff would “get in the way and stop us making decisions”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 25 July 2022
  25. News Article
    A lack of accountability is causing the quality of NHS services to crumble, according to some of the most respected trust chief executives. They said the problem arose from four factors: the lack of an operating model for how NHS England should oversee the service, confusion over what integrated care systems should be responsible for, the lack of clarity on which standards providers should be seeking to meet, and trust leaders not holding each other to account. The views were expressed at a roundtable to mark the publication of HSJ’s annual ranking of the NHS’s “top 50 trust chief executives”. The most strongly worded contribution came from Milton Keynes University Hospital Foundation Trust chief executive Joe Harrison. He told the roundtable: “I’m really concerned about where we are at as an NHS. I think we’re in danger of all sitting around the campfire singing ‘kumbaya’ as the Titanic sinks. “We are presiding over a failing NHS. There’s no question about it. And if we carry on like this, people have every right to say, ‘what on earth are we spending £150bn on?’” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 25 July 2022
×
×
  • Create New...