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Content Article
Care provided by families valued at £135 billion over course of the pandemic so far. Carers UK calls on Government to recognise contribution of millions of carers and protect their health and wellbeing Research, released for Carers Rights Day, estimates that the care provided by people looking after older, disabled and seriously ill relatives and friends during the pandemic stands at £135 billion so far, after just eight months. Previous research by the charity found that the majority (81%) of carers have been taking on more care since the start of the pandemic and nearly two thirds (63%) are worried about how they will continue to manage over winter. Carers UK is calling on the Government to provide additional support for carers over winter and ensure those caring for more than 50 hours a week get access to a funded break. With many crucial face-to-face support services such as day centres and support groups significantly reduced – or in many cases closed – because of costly infection and control measures, Carers UK is warning that people caring round the clock are going to break down after months of caring without respite. -
Content ArticleThe latest newsletter from the Patient Safety Authority highlights the importance of stronger warnings on medications, tracking the way misinformation spreads online, treating brain conditions through art and music, and more.
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Content ArticleStu King is is joined by Dr Nisreen Alwan and Prof Susan Michie. Nisreen is Associate Professor in Public Health, University of Southampton. Susan is Director, UCL Centre for Behaviour Change & a committee member of Independent Sage. In this podcast, Nisreen shares her experience of long COVID, what it means and its effects. They look at how both those with long COVID and healthcare workers are affected - how the range of symptoms can be difficult to diagnose, causing anxiety. Plus, the challenge for patients of managing with such unpredictability. Nisreen and Susan discuss the evidence of who is at risk, including young people. And how the public messaging around COVID could do more to alert this group of the risks to their health & wellbeing. Nisreen shares the support available through healthcare and peer support. And Susan shares how indieSAGE will be discussing it in order to advise the government.
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Content ArticleBack in April the ME Association (MEA) became aware of an increasing number of people who had been ill with COVID-19 and were not improving, even after several weeks. Almost all had been self-managed at home with an illness that mostly varied from mild to moderate in severity, but not requiring hospital admission. Most had debilitating fatigue, sometimes with continuing COVID-19 symptoms involving the lungs or heart in particular. Some had symptoms that are more consistent with the sort of post viral fatigue syndromes that may precede ME/ CFS. Five months on and we are now in a situation where some people are being given a diagnosis, or a possible diagnosis, of post COVID-19 ME/CFS. Back in April the ME Association produced an MEA guide to post COVID fatigue and post COVID fatigue syndromes. This information and guidance has now been fully updated to cover all the developments that have occurred since then.
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Content ArticleIn this article, published by the Harvard Business Review, authors discuss how to safely tackle the backlog of elective surgeries, created by the initial wave of the pandemic. They highlight the significant role of human factors such as stress or fatigue, and suggest strategies to mitigate them.
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Content ArticleThe collapse of healthcare services round the world, the behaviour of some of the “agencies” enforcing quarantining, and high levels of patient harm during the COVID-19 pandemic, undoubtedly warrant a strong response. We need a new agenda for change if we are to address the current threat to patient centred healthcare and patient safety globally. Kawaldip Sehmi, CEO International Alliance of Patient Organizations, summarises the key messages and actions from the 9th biennial Global Patients Congress 2020,
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Nigeria: World Patient Safety Day 2020
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Staff safety
Nigeria joined the rest of the world to celebrate World Patient Safety Day on 17 September 2020. This event was jointly organised this year in Nigeria by the Occupational Health and Safety Managers (OHSM), Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN), OSHAfrica, International Trade Union Congress (ITUC-Africa), Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) and the World Health Organization (WHO). -
Content ArticleThis policy paper sets out the key elements of national support available for the social care sector for winter 2020 to 2021, as well as the main actions to take for local authorities, NHS organisations, and social care providers, including in the voluntary and community sector.Working together will ensure that high-quality, safe and timely care is provided to everyone who needs it, whilst protecting people who need care, their carers and the social care workforce from COVID-19.
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Content ArticleThis report sets out the progress and learning from the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in informing advice and recommendations to government and the social care sector. The Social Care Sector COVID-19 Support Taskforce was commissioned in June 2020, with this report seeing the completion of its work in August 2020. The taskforce was set up to oversee the delivery of two packages of support that the government had put in place for the care sector: the Social Care Action Plan and the Care Home Support Plan. In addition, the taskforce was asked to support the government's work on community outbreaks – areas of the country that needed particular help and intervention to deal with higher rates of infection – and advising and supporting local places to consider and respond to reducing the risk of infection in care homes and the wider social care sector. Its further remit was to provide advice on the requirements for the response to COVID-19 in the next few months, ahead of and into winter.
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Content ArticleIn these times where the pressure of track and trace is ramping up around the world in the wake of expectations of a return to normality, Matt Pattison talks with Professor Effy Vayena from ETH Zurich about her work with the Swiss government in ethics, digital and the risks and rewards viewed under an ethical lens in the TEN podcast.
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Content ArticleBetween 6 May and 17 August 2020, the Patients Association asked patients about their experiences during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in an online survey.
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Content ArticleSarah Scobie, Deputy Director of Research at the Nuffield Trust, looks at the continued high numbers of people dying at home, even as hospital deaths return to close-to-average levels, and discusses what reasons might lie behind the continued high numbers of home deaths since the onset of the pandemic. Whatever the reasons for the greater number of deaths at home, a third more people are now dying at home than prior to the pandemic. Although it is widely thought that many people prefer to die at home, this shift presents a significant challenge for community health and care services to deliver high quality care for patients, and to support families at the end of life.
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Content ArticleWhen crises happen, staff health and social services rise to the challenge. No-one knew exactly what the impact of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, would be but it was clear that everyone would be required to adopt new and different ways of working. Here is the story behind Healthcare Improvement Scotland's new National Wellbeing Hub website which is part of a network of support provided for all health and social care staff wherever they work in Scotland, and unpaid carers, that helps people look after themselves. The Hub complements other national support initiatives such as the National Helpline, and those provided at local level by NHS boards, health and social care partnerships and local authorities.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic is a traumatic event for many, particularly those in the caring professions. Experts are predicting a significant “second curve” of mental health problems among both healthcare workers and the public related to prolonged social isolation, loss of economic opportunity, grief from losing loved ones, among other causes. While there has been no shortage of resources and recommendations designed to help healthcare workers manage stress during the pandemic, there’s a tendency to place the burden on the individual. At a minimum, it is important that remedies acknowledge the shared responsibility of the healthcare system for creating the conditions for fear, anxiety, and burnout in the first place. In an effort to streamline, provide sensemaking, and support care teams during this critical time, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) synthesised themes from several key publications, expert interviews, and five years of experience gained by partnering with health systems around the world to address staff well-being and joy in work. Three key areas to focus on have emerged, along with specific actions healthcare leaders can take to support their workforce and address the more immediate and longer-term effects of the pandemic.
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Content ArticleDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, health care leaders are working to support staff who are experiencing anxiety, stress, and intense demands. This guide from the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI), which builds on the IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work, includes actionable ideas that leaders can quickly test during the coronavirus response, and which can build the longer-term foundation to sustain joy in work for the health care workforce.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic has had one of the biggest effects on work-as-done in healthcare in living memory. So what might we learn about work from the perspectives of frontline workers? Steven Shorrock asked a variety of practitioners to give a short answer – whatever came to mind. The themes that emerge centre around people, their activities, their contexts, and their tools. Many insights concerned the varieties of human work, goal conflicts, design, training, communication, teamwork, social capital, leadership, organisational hierarchy, problem solving and innovation, and – generally – change. Steven Shorrock is an interdisciplinary humanistic, systems and design practitioner interested in human work from multiple perspectives.
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Content Article
My hospital experiences during COVID-19 by Chris Maddocks
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Blogs
Chris Maddocks has dementia and on 28 July, after suddenly becoming unwell, she was admitted to her local hospital. She shares her experience of being in hospital and explains how small things can become much bigger for someone living with dementia. She hopes by sharing that this will help others who may be admitted in the future. -
Content ArticleIf you’re a mental health professional helping frontline healthcare workers who are providing care to people affected by COVID 19, Professor Neil Greenberg, from Kings College London, offers three important things to think about: How do you prevent staff from developing mental health difficulties? How do you find out really early on in order that you can provide simple interventions? How do you provide treatment for people who unfortunately do go on and develop mental health difficulties?
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Content ArticleEditorial from Liam J Donaldson and Neelam Dhingra in the Journal of Patient Safety and Risk Management for World Patient Safety Day.
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Content ArticleThis is the first of a series of webinars Patient Safety Learning, Health Plus Care and BD are holding on patient safety on the frontline, exploring burning patient safety issues and engaging with frontline healthcare workers, clinical leaders and patient safety experts. COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on access to non-COVID care and treatment. We know there are over a million extra patients awaiting hospital treatment. The NHS has issued guidance for ‘accelerating the return to near-normal levels of non-COVID health services, making full use of the capacity available in the ‘window of opportunity’ between now and winter.’ In this webinar, the panel discusses these issues with frontline clinicians and patient safety experts.
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Content ArticleThe All Party Parliamentary Group on Sexual and Reproductive Health (APPG SRH) opened the Inquiry into Access to Contraception in 2019, in response to reports of women being unable to access contraception in a way that meets their needs. The Inquiry's report, Women's Lives, Women's Rights: Strengthening Access to Contraception Beyond the Pandemic has now been published and looks specifically at the following key areas: Fragmented commissioning Funding Workforce Data collection Education and information Access for marginalised groups Opportunities to improve contraceptive provision.
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Content ArticleThis is a Early Day Motion tabled in the House of Commons on the 8th September 2020 which notes that significant numbers of people in the UK are living with Long COVID, a term for those with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 who are continuing to struggle with prolonged, debilitating and sometimes severe symptoms months later. The motion calls for the Government to consider and implement measures to support those living with Long COVID.
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Content ArticleIt is often the case that particular healthcare policies and practices change overnight from being discouraged or even forbidden to becoming more or less compulsory. An example of this is the change in how patients can access doctors during the coronavirus pandemic. At the end of July, Matt Hancock gave a speech on the future of healthcare in which he declared “… from now on, all consultations should be teleconsultations unless there is a compelling reason not to.” The following day, Sir Simon Stevens’ letter on the third phase of the NHS response to COVID-19 gave more nuanced messages and acknowledged the place of face to face consultations alongside digital and telephone consultations in some circumstances. Meanwhile, a recent RCGP survey reported that at the present time 61% of appointments are full telephone consultations and 16% are telephone triages. Many changes in how patients can access doctors have the potential to offer great benefits to patients and to ease pressures on health systems; however, what is right in some circumstances is not right for all as Ros Levenson, Chair of Academy Patient and Lay Committee, Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, discusses in her blog.
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Content ArticleA large sample of non-hospitalised COVID-19 patients still experience multiple symptoms months after being infected. These persistent symptoms are associated with many clinically relevant outcomes, including poor health status and impaired functional status. To date, no information is available about care dependency. The authors of this study, published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, aimed to explore the level of care dependency and the need for assistance with personal care in non-hospitalised COVID-19 patients.
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Content ArticleThis survey, a collaboration between the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) and the International Hospital Federation (IHF) was designed to frame the WHO Global Consultation on Patient Safety, which was held from 24-26 February 2020 to kick off the development of the Global Patient Safety Action Plan. Already then, the pandemic-to-be was affecting various regions, before striking health systems worldwide. The question of patient safety is a critical one in the discussion about COVID-19: hygiene and hospital-acquired infections, non-suitable hospital architecture, delayed surgeries and procedures, lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and much more affected the safety of patients as well as of health workers, to whom the World Patient Safety Day 2020 is dedicated. In February 2020, the IHF disseminated a short survey on national safety plans to its Full Members, hospitals’ national/regional representatives. At the same time, ISQua disseminated their survey asking how well incident reporting is in place, and if the outcomes improve the 'no blame no shame' approach to their Individual and Institutional Members. The surveys were repeated in July 2020 to see if the onset of COVID-19 had made any positive or negative changes to the responses.
