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Found 1,299 results
  1. News Article
    General practices should delay rolling out the accelerated citizens’ access programme, due to go live on 1 November, if they have concerns over safety, the BMA has said. In guidance published on 25 October the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee said that while many practices would be able to implement the scheme before the deadline some would need more time to prepare, to ensure that they can roll it out in line with the Data Protection Act and safeguarding measures. The access scheme, led by NHS England, will automatically give patients the ability to see any new entries to their GP medical record through the NHS App. As part of safeguarding practices it will require GPs to review each record to identify any safety concerns related to providing patient access, such as in cases of domestic violence or coercive relationships. Where there are safeguarding concerns, practices can prevent patients from having automatic access by adding a specific SNOMED code to the patient’s record before 1 November 2022. David Wrigley, deputy chair of the BMA’s GP Committee for England, said, “We have a duty of care to speak up when patient safety is at risk, which is why we encourage practices even slightly unsure about whether they can deliver this programme before the start of November, to refer to our guidance. Our patients are at the heart of what we do, and we will always act in their best interests.” Read full story Source: BMJ, 26 October 2022
  2. News Article
    Private companies are offering “misleading” home blood-testing kits that fuel health anxieties and pile pressure on the NHS, a report has suggested. There has been a boom in sales of the kits, which promise to reveal everything from cancer risk to how long patients can expect to live. But an investigation by the BMJ found these “unnecessary and potentially invasive tests” can be misleading and generate false alarms. The NHS is then left to “clear up the mess” as worried patients see GPs for reassurance or extra tests, piling more pressure on the overstretched service. One GP described patients coming in “clutching the results of private screening tests”, with doctors asked to review the results. The companies have been criticised for not providing sufficient follow-ups after the “poor quality and overhyped” tests, and for misleading results such as wrongly telling people their test levels are outside the “normal” range. Bernie Croal, president of the Association for Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine, said: “Most of the online [tests] will send the results to the patient with at best a sort of asterisk next to the ones that are abnormal, with advice to either pay some more money to get some sort of health professional to speak about it or go and see your own GP.” Doctors are calling for the tests to be more tightly regulated by the health watchdog, the Care Quality Commission. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 27 October 2022
  3. News Article
    Patients from minority groups are facing longer wait times for potentially life-saving lung cancer treatment compared to their white counterparts, according to a study. Experts warn that disparities can have real consequences – the earlier treatment is initiated, the better the health outcomes for patients. Researchers at the University of Virginia (UVA) Cancer Centre reviewed data from more than 222,700 patients with non-small cell lung cancer across the US. The findings, published in the scientific journal Health Equity, showed that the mean time for radiation initiation was 61.7 days. Broken down by ethnicity, white patients had to wait only 60.9 days, while Black patients had a wait time of 65.9 days, meanwhile for Asian patients, it was 71.9 days. A single-week delay in treatment could lead to a 3.2% and 1.6% increase in the risk of death for patients with stage I and stage II non-small cell lung cancer, respectively. “Our results suggest that non-white lung cancer patients have delayed time to cancer treatment compared with white patients, and this is not limited to a particular type of treatment facility,” said senior researcher Rajesh Balkrishnan, PhD, of UVA Cancer Center and the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health Sciences. “Collaboration among providers and community stakeholders and organisations is much needed to increase accessibility and patient knowledge of cancer and to overcome existing disparities in timely care for lung cancer patients.” Scientists cite multiple reasons for the racial disparities, including health insurance – non-white patients are more likely to be uninsured, face greater socioeconomic barriers to care and may be perceived by doctors as being at risk for not following through with treatment plans. Read full story Source: The Independent, 26 October 2022
  4. News Article
    Just a “fraction” of people with Long Covid is getting the help they need, with a third of them waiting more than three and a half months to be assessed after a GP referral, rising to almost half in some areas. More than 60,000 people in England had a first assessment for post-Covid syndrome in an NHS specialist service between July 2021 and August 2022. But the latest estimates released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that about 277,000 people with Long Covid in England report that the disease has limited their day-to-day activities “a lot”. These are the people that experts would expect to be referred for an assessment; however, the numbers who have been seen are far lower. Dr Helen Salisbury, a GP and columnist for the BMJ, said: “A fraction of the people who have got this problem are actually being seen” within the existing services. She said reasons could include patients not realising that the help is available to them; GPs not recognising Long Covid in those who do not self-label as having the condition; and a lack of knowledge of, and local access to, specialised clinics. While Salisbury conceded that there was no current cure for long Covid, she added that patients require treatment that involves symptom management, psychology and knowing they are not alone in their diagnosis. Ondine Sherwood, a co-founder of the advocacy charity Long Covid SOS, said many people with long Covid “are struggling to get any healthcare. Many are not getting any treatment at all.” She said public misconceptions around long Covid made it harder for sufferers to ask for and get help. “There was a lack of preparedness for the potential long-term morbidity which was not conveyed to healthcare professionals and this has contributed to the lack of care for long Covid.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 27 October 2022
  5. News Article
    Sarah was only allowed to see her 78-year-old mother through a small, double-glazed window that opened 2in at the bottom. There had been a Covid outbreak in her care home and her family were barred from entry, contrary to government guidelines. But this was not December 2020. It was two months ago. “It was just horrific,” said Sarah. “Mum said, ‘I feel like I’m in prison.’ And it was hard for us to disagree.” Sarah and her sisters kept pushing for visitor rights, offering to wear full PPE, but the home, which charged £1,050 a week, instead issued a 28-day eviction notice, saying they “could not meet the family’s needs”. In March this year, all restrictions on care homes were lifted. In a Covid outbreak — two or more positive tests — “visits should happen in all circumstances”. Each resident is allowed one visitor, and this does not need to be the same person throughout the outbreak. However, privately run homes are not following government guidelines. “We saw a massive, tragic loss of life at the beginning of the pandemic among this demographic,” said Helen Wildbore, director of Relatives and Residents Association. “But now care homes have swung dramatically to the other extreme and they have become medically risk averse at the cost of people’s mental health and quality of life. We know people in isolation who have just given up the will to live, who feel like they have been abandoned.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 23 October 2022 You may also be interested to read these two original blogs posted on the hub: Visiting restrictions and the impact on patients and their families: a relative's perspective It’s time to rename the ‘visitor’: reflections from a relative
  6. News Article
    The NHS in Wales needs to "speed up the process" of treating people waiting over two years for hospital treatment, the health minister said. Eluned Morgan said health boards need to prioritise the "longest waiters and they're not always doing that". There are 59,350 people waiting over two years in Wales, although the number has fallen for a fifth month in a row. The Welsh NHS Confederation, which represents NHS health organisations, has been asked to comment. In Wales, there are 183,450 operations and procedures waiting more than a year. Overall waits - from referral to treatment - have passed 750,000. Scotland has 7,650 patients waiting more than two years, England has 2,646. Asked on BBC Politics Wales why so many more people are waiting longer in Wales, Ms Morgan said: "Our health boards need to make sure that they're taking people from the longest waiters and they're not always doing that." Read full story Source: BBC News, 23 October 2022
  7. News Article
    A Harley Street doctor suspended for working while testing positive for Covid at the height of the pandemic has said that his patient’s cancer treatment took priority. Dr Andrew Gaya was found to have “blatantly disregarded” the rules by going to work at a centre for patients with brain tumours after he tested positive for the disease. The “highly regarded” consultant oncologist “dishonestly” misled colleagues that he was safe to work by keeping his positive test secret, a tribunal found. Dr Gaya, whose work is at the forefront of tumour care and has been described as “world class”, said he defied Covid-19 rules because he believed “the risk of harm to his patient” in delaying treatment was “greater than the risk he posed”. Now, the doctor of 27 years has been suspended for three months at a Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 20 Ocotober 2022
  8. News Article
    Patients in England are being put at risk because of the unacceptably poor service they receive from GPs, MPs say. The House of Commons' Health Committee blamed the failure to tackle doctor shortages, which had led to a decline in the GP-patient relationship. Seeing a GP should not be like booking an Uber with a driver you are unlikely to see again, the MPs said. The warning comes just weeks after ministers launched a drive to improve access to GP services. But the cross-party group of MPs said more needed to be done. Louise Ansari, from the patient group Healthwatch England, said, "The impacts of poor access can be huge, with people feeling abandoned and suffering in silence and not getting referred to hospitals for more specialised treatment." Read full story Source: BBC News, 20 October 2022
  9. News Article
    The “social prescribing” of gardening, singing and art classes is a waste of NHS money, a study suggests. Experts found that sending patients to community activity groups had “little to no impact” on improving health or reducing demand on GP services. The research calls into question a major drive from the NHS and Department of Health to increase social prescribing as a solution to the shortage of doctors and medical staff. In 2019 the NHS set a target of referring 900,000 patients for such activities via their GP surgeries within five years. Projects receiving government funding include football to support mental health, art for dementia, community gardening and singing classes to help patients to recover from Covid. However, the study, published in the journal BMJ Open, said there was “scant evidence” to support the mass rollout of so-called “social prescribing link workers”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 18 October 2022
  10. News Article
    More than a quarter of women with ovarian cancer saw their GP three or more times before getting a referral for tests, according to a new study. Researchers also found that almost a third had waited for longer than three months after first going to see their GP before being given the right diagnosis. If doctors are able to diagnose ovarian cancer at the earliest stage, nine out of 10 women will go on to live for five years or longer, but only around one in 10 survive if it is not caught until it has progressed to stage 4, the most advanced stage. The report, by Target Ovarian Cancer, also revealed that 14 per cent of women polled said they were not given their diagnosis in private, meaning others could listen in on the exchange. “I was told of my stage 4 diagnosis behind the curtain on a busy respiratory ward. The rest of the ward heard the conversation,” one woman said. Meanwhile, GPs and ovarian cancer patients told researchers that the support available for the disease is insufficient – with almost half of the women polled not having been asked by a doctor, nurse or other individual providing treatment about how the cancer diagnosis was affecting their mental health. This is despite the fact that 60% of the women diagnosed with ovarian cancer said their mental health had been harmed by the disease. Read full story Source: The Independent. 18 October 2022
  11. News Article
    Doctors have criticised new health secretary Therese Coffey over reports that pharmacists will be allowed to prescribe antibiotics without the approval of a doctor. According to The Times, Ms Coffey’s “Plan for Patients” will give pharmacists the power to prescribe certain drugs, such as contraception, without a prescription in an effort to reduce the need for GP appointments and tackle waiting lists. Responding to reports of the plans, Rachel Clarke, an NHS palliative care doctor and writer, wrote on Twitter: “This is staggeringly irresponsible of Therese Coffey and will cause so much more harm than good. “Doctors do not – unlike Coffey – dish out spare antibiotics to our family and friends because we’re painfully aware of the harms of antibiotic resistance. Utter recklessness.” Stephen Baker, a professor at Cambridge University and an expert in molecular microbiology and antimicrobial resistance, branded the health secretary’s plans “moronic”. He told the newspaper that the more antibiotics were used “the more likely we are to get drug-resistant organisms”. He added that it was “nuts” to consider widening access to drugs, adding that resistance against antibiotics is “clearly one of the biggest problems humanity is facing in respect of infectious disease at the moment”. Read full story Source: The Independent, 17 October 2022
  12. News Article
    Angry exchanges between paramedics and A&E staff in Liverpool have broken out after new measures were deployed to hold and treat patients in the back of ambulances. Sources said there have been “Mexican standoff” situations at Aintree Hospital in recent days, after hospital staff insisted patients who had been brought inside should be returned to ambulance vehicles. Staff at North West Ambulance Service told HSJ they were informed of a new protocol last week, which said patients should be kept in the back of ambulances if the corridor of the emergency department is full with patients. There have been repeated orders from NHS England and the Care Quality Commission over the past year for hospitals to ensure patients can be offloaded by ambulance crews, even if they fear they do not have adequate staffing or beds to accept them. One senior source at NWAS said: “To see a new protocol like this is absolutely unprecedented. I very much doubt the execs had approved it. “We’ve had Mexican standoff situations over the weekend with crews who have brought patients into ED being told to take them back out to their vehicles, but they’ve refused to do this as it means they cannot cohort. “We completely accept that taking extra patients means the ED and hospital staff have to deal with additional and unacceptable risk, but holding ambulances is not the solution because the risks to patients out in the community are even greater. Despite repeated instructions from NHS England and the CQC this still doesn’t seem to be understood.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 17 October 2022
  13. News Article
    Long Covid clinics across Australia are being inundated with requests for assessments from patients struggling with ongoing symptoms, an inquiry has heard. Doctors told the federal parliamentary inquiry into long and repeated coronavirus infections that they were struggling to keep up with demand as waitlists increased. At least 10 million Australians have been infected with Covid and it is estimated 3-5% will develop Long Covid at some point. “Our waitlist is increasing because what we’ve observed is that it can take some time for the recognition of post-Covid conditions, particularly with the fatigue-predominant types, to reach us,” Royal Children’s hospital Associate Prof Shidan Tosif told the inquiry on Wednesday. Patients are usually referred to specialist clinics through a GP and while there is no official cure, symptoms can sometimes be treated on a case-by-case basis. The inquiry by the House of Representatives health committee is investigating the economic, social, educational and health impacts of long Covid and repeat infections. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 12 October 2022
  14. News Article
    An IT failure has left clinicians at ‘a number of trusts’ which use the Cerner Millennium system unable to access patient records or write discharge summaries, according to an internal trust email seen by HSJ. The email, sent to staff at Barts Health Trust this afternoon, said there was a “performance issue” with Cerner PowerChart which was affecting “a number of other trusts”. The Powerchart programme is the part of the Cerner Millennium electronic patient record system used by clinicians to process document notes, request tests, view blood tests and scan reports. At least 13 trusts in the English NHS are known to use the Cerner Millennium system but it is not yet clear how many trusts aside from Barts have been affected. One clinician told HSJ the outage was “overwhelmingly unsafe” for patients. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 11 October 2022
  15. News Article
    NHS trusts may be forced to cancel appointments and limit visiting times in a Covid and flu “twindemic” this winter, health leaders have warned. Fears have been raised the viruses could strip back the workforce and further increase demand for services during an already busy period. It comes amid rising Covid infections in the UK. Around 1.3 million tested positive in late September, according to the latest figures, which was a 25% increase on the week before. The UK is also concerned there could be a bad flu season this year, with lower immunity across the population due to reduced exposure in the Covid pandemic. NHS leaders have warned that this background could make winter even more difficult for the health service. “I make no bones about this: we know it’s going to be a pressurised time for trusts over the next four months if not longer,” Saffron Cordery from NHS Providers, which represents trusts in England, told The Independent. The interim chief executive added: “We’re worried about Covid and we’re worried about flu.” Ms Cordery said these joint pressures – which could increase demand, strip back workforces and introduce the need for greater infection control measures – could have a knock-on effect on services. “We need to anticipate that there may well be cancellations for either outpatient appointments or routine procedures or operations, because there could be staff shortages or rising demand in emergency care – that means that those routine appointments cannot take place as quickly as we’d like,” she said. Read full story Source: The Independent, 8 October 2022
  16. News Article
    Mental health patients are increasingly having to turn to A&E for help, experts have warned, as new research suggests nearly one in four are being forced to wait more than 12 weeks to start treatment. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said its research found 43% of adults with mental illness say the long waits for treatment have led to their mental health getting worse. Almost a quarter (23%) have to wait more than 12 weeks to start treatment, with many so desperate they turn to A&E or dial 999. The college said many people face a “hidden wait time” for starting treatment, with no publicly available data on how long people wait from their initial referral to actually starting treatment. Those surveyed for the research had a range of mental illnesses, including eating disorders, addiction, bipolar disorder, anxiety and depression. Dr Kate Lovett, the college’s presidential lead for recruitment, said: “We cannot sit idly by and watch the most vulnerable people in our society end up in crisis. Not only do spiralling mental health waiting times wreak havoc on patients’ lives, but they also leave NHS services with the impossible task of tackling rising demand.” One female patient, a 45-year-old from south London, told how she ended up in A&E after having to wait seven months to be referred to a community team. “The only other way to get help was to present to A&E, which was a traumatic experience – having to be reassessed and readmitted again and again. Turning up to A&E was the only way I could be seen regularly. No one should have to go through that.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 10 October 2022
  17. News Article
    Patients face being removed from the NHS waiting list if they decline two dates offered to them for their treatment, new internal guidance seen by HSJ reveals. The “interim operational guidance” from NHS England says if patients decline two proposed dates for treatment, they should be moved on to “active monitoring” and removed from the NHS’s main elective waiting list. Waiting list consultant Rob Findlay said the guidance was an “abuse of national waiting times statistics”, and that “the menacing of patients [proposed in the strategies outlined in the guidance] is appalling”. The Royal College of Surgeons of England told HSJ it had not been consulted on the guidance, as it would have expected. The college said the guidance could be positive if used “sensibly” but it warned that “used poorly, it could see patients lost in the system, or banished to waiting list purgatory”. NHSE elective recovery adviser Sir Jim Mackey told HSJ the guidance was to support trusts to manage “a small number of patients who… continue to decline treatment date offers [and] to fill appointment slots so patients get seen as soon as possible”. He said there were long-waiting patients who have “refused offers of treatment alternative, sometimes multiple offers. This is absolutely their choice, but it does make access for other patients more difficult when slots are held for them”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 6 October 2022
  18. News Article
    Norfolk Community Health and Care it is using a remote monitoring service from Inhealthcare which allows patients to monitor their vital signs at home and relay readings via a choice of communication channels to clinicians who monitor trends and intervene if readings provide any cause for concern. Analysis of the six months before and after introduction showed a significant reduction in hospital bed days, A&E attendances, GP visits and out-of-hours appointments. Lead heart failure nurse at the trust, Rhona Macpherson, spoke to Digital Health News about the impact of the services on patients and nurses. For Macpherson, the service has helped promote self-management. “We give each of the patients a set of scales, blood pressure monitor and pulse oximeter and we get them to do their observations,” she said. “So we’re promoting self-management and looking at things but also it means that we can get accurate information on what’s happening with their observations. “We then set parameters to alert if they go outside of the parameters, and it just means we can intervene much more quickly than we would do, and we can see what’s going on between our visits as well as what’s happening when we’re actually there.” The service has transformed working practices for nurses, increasing efficiency and saving valuable time. Macpherson said: “We’re using the technology to try and make ourselves a little bit more efficient, so it’s saving on the travel time and face to face visits. “We can do a lot more with telephone. We’ve got the option of using video, but telephone is actually quite useful. So it’s less face to face visits, less travel and also, we’re trying to empower the patients to do their own observations and monitor themselves, rather than us just doing it for them.”
  19. News Article
    A miniature radar system that tracks a person as they walk around their home could be used to measure the effectiveness of treatments for Parkinson’s. The disease, which affects about 145,000 people in the UK, is linked to the death of nerve cells in the brain that help to control movement. With no quick diagnostic test available at present, doctors must usually review a patient’s medical history and look for symptoms that often develop only very slowly, such as muscle stiffness and tremors. The device, about the size of a wi-fi router, is designed to give a more precise picture of how the severity of symptoms changes, both over the long term and hourly. It sits in one room and emits radio signals that bounce off the body of a patient. Using artificial intelligence it is able to recognise and lock on to one individual. Over several months it will notice if their walking speed is becoming slower in a way that indicates that the disease is becoming worse. During a single day it can also recognise periods where a person’s strides quicken, which means that it could be used to monitor the effectiveness of new and existing drugs, even where the effects last a relatively short time. “This really gives us the possibility to objectively measure how your mobility responds to your medication. Previously, this was nearly impossible to do because this medication effect could only be measured by having the patient keep a journal,” said Yingcheng Liu, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who is part of the team behind the device. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 22 September 2022
  20. News Article
    An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that scans eyes can accurately predict a person’s risk of heart disease in less than a minute, researchers say. The breakthrough could enable ophthalmologists and other health workers to carry out cardiovascular screening on the high street using a camera – without the need for blood tests or blood pressure checks – according to the world’s largest study of its kind. Researchers found AI-enabled imaging of the retina’s veins and arteries can specify the risk of cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular death and stroke. They say the results could open the door to a highly effective, non-invasive test becoming available for people at medium to high risk of heart disease that does not have to be done in a clinic. “This AI tool could let someone know in 60 seconds or less their level of risk,” the lead author of the study, Prof Alicja Rudnicka, told the Guardian. If someone learned their risk was higher than expected, they could be prescribed statins or offered another intervention, she said. Speaking from a health conference in Copenhagen, Rudnicka, a professor of statistical epidemiology at St George’s, University of London, added: “It could end up improving cardiovascular health and save lives.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 4 October 2022
  21. News Article
    Both patients and healthcare staff have a central role to play in ensuring the safe use of medicines, Health Minister Robin Swann has said. Minister for Health Robin Swann was speaking at an event to mark the roll out of the ‘Know, Check, Ask’ Campaign across all healthcare sectors in Northern Ireland. The aim of the campaign is to increase awareness and understanding about the importance of using medicine safely. The call for action of the campaign is for: Patients to Know Check Ask – Before you take it: KNOW your medicines and keep an up-to-date list. CHECK that you are using your medicines in the right way. ASK your healthcare professional if you’re not sure. Health Care staff to Know Check Ask – Before you give it: KNOW your medications. CHECK you have the right: patient, medicine, route, dose and time. ASK your patient if they understand and ask your colleagues when you are unsure. Minister Swann added “I want to encourage and help patients to be more curious about their medication, know what medication they are using, how to use it safely and feel able to ask their health care professionals questions about their medicines. Patients should also feel able and confident to report problems with their medication early and so help reduce avoidable harm.” Read full story Source: Department of Health, 30 September 2022
  22. News Article
    A “perilous” shortage of homecare workers is the biggest reason thousands of people are languishing longer in hospital than needed, driving up waiting lists and making people sicker, figures reveal. Almost one in four people unable to be discharged – sometimes for weeks – were trapped in hospital because they were waiting for home care, as agencies hand back contracts because staff are quitting owing to low pay, leaving 15% of jobs vacant. A fifth of people unable to be discharged were also waiting for short-term rehabilitation and 15% were waiting for a bed in a care home, according to analysis of data obtained using freedom of information requests and public records by Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation. It estimated that in April this year, one in six patients were in hospital because of delayed discharge, and the discharge of patients with a hospital stay of more than three weeks was delayed by 14 days on average. “People are ending up in hospital for malnutrition and dehydration, problems which, even if you supported people a little bit at home, would stop,” said Jane Townson, the director of the Homecare Association. “More providers are having to turn down work than usual and some are having to hand back people because they can’t do it.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 October 2022
  23. News Article
    Hannah Rusby reassures her patient he’s in good hands. He is in his eighties, skeletal, confused and struggling to answer basic questions. His breathing is rapid. After a few minutes of probing questions and basic tests, Rusby knows this is serious — after months of decline while living alone, the man is critically ill and needs to go to hospital urgently. With more than 500,000 people waiting for social care assessments across England, emergency calls such as this are increasingly common. “We are becoming a middleman for all the other services,” said Rusby, who qualified as a paramedic seven years ago and works for the London Ambulance Service (LAS). She said the job increasingly involves responding to people who fall through society’s cracks. Daniel Elkeles, 49, chief executive of the LAS, agrees: “There are lots of patients who, if something else were available, we wouldn’t need to take them to hospital. As the population has got older and frailer, it’s unsurprising that an increasing number of the calls are not traditional emergencies.” He believes paramedics can be the link between GPs, community nursing and social care. From next week, the LAS will pilot having three cars covering six boroughs in southwest London. Each will have a paramedic and a community nurse and will respond to 999 calls from elderly people who have fallen at home. They’re going to see every frail elderly person who has fallen [and] hasn’t broken a bone, and our aim is to keep all of those patients at home. The community nurse will assess the house to make sure it’s safe then refer the patient to their GP and an urgent community response team,” said Elkeles. The service hopes this will mean as many as 1,000 fewer people going to A&E a year. Read full story (paywalled) Source: Sunday Times, 2 September 2022
  24. News Article
    New hospitals may be required to have single patient rooms only, HSJ has revealed Chiefs at the New Hospitals Programme (NHP) are assessing whether to include a requirement for 100% single rooms in the new facilities, in what would be a major change for NHS hospital design. It comes a year after NHS England medical director Stephen Powis said single patient rooms should be “the default” in hospitals as this would improve infection control and patient flow. Currently, the Department of Health and Social Care expects hospitals to consider a minimum of 50% single rooms when refurbishing or building new sites. HSJ understands the NHP is working with the NHS’ technical standards team on how many single rooms will be required in the new hospitals the government has committed to building by 2030. The teams are considering recommending the percentage to be raised from 50% to 100%. The work is part of efforts to standardise design across the NHP projects and so therefore better control costs. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 30 September 2022
  25. News Article
    A nurse has told how she almost quit her job this month after a patient shouted out racist slurs for hours on a recent night shift. Beverly Simpson, who works as a nurse in a care home in Derry, Northern Ireland, said she was left angry and broken after a patient repeatedly used derogatory racist language and told her ‘to go back to her own country’. Ms Simpson reported the incident on 4 September to managers, who are now investigating. In the meantime, she has called on all employers and peers to do more to protect staff from racism that she says she encounters every week. "I have been a nurse for almost 30 years, but that night made me feel like I wanted to quit,’ she told Nursing Standard. ‘I was just worn down with it all. I’m human, I am hurt, but I still have to go back and treat this patient, be professional and hold my head up high." "It’s all very well a black nurse standing up and saying it is wrong, but we need allies. There needs to be training and protocols on what to do in these situations. Instead, there is a blanket of silence." Read full story Source: Nursing Standard, 28 September 2022
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