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Content Article
NHSX information governance portal
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in NHS X
NHSX has launched a brand new information governance portal providing a 'one-stop shop' for NHS policies and guidance. -
Content ArticleNHSX recently launched a brand new information governance portal providing a 'one-stop shop' for NHS policies and guidance. The new portal covers everything from GDPR in research to record management. But even with the new portal, navigating NHS guidance on data isn't easy. This article in Global Compliance News picks out six essential items to have on your radar if your organisation accesses or uses NHS data.
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Content ArticleThis World Health Organization (WHO) policy brief highlights areas where policy-makers can take action to meet the challenge of post-Covid conditions based on what is currently known. It addresses the need for multidisciplinary, multispecialty approaches to assessment and management; development of new care pathways and contextually appropriate guidelines for health professionals; and the creation of appropriate services, including rehabilitation and online support tools.
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Content ArticleNHS Solent share their policy on healthcare workers screening and immunisation. The primary purpose of this policy is to reduce the risk of transmission of infection (as far as reasonably practical) from an infected healthcare worker-to-patient. The main known risks of infection through bloodborne virus in the clinical setting are from hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV. This measure is not intended to prevent those healthcare workers from working in the NHS but rather to restrict them from working in clinical areas where their infection may pose a risk to patients in their care and by early diagnosis; allows them to manage their own health.
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Content ArticleThe “WHO handbook for national quality policy and strategy” outlines an approach for the development of national policies and strategies to improve the quality of care. Such policy and strategy can help clarify the structures, roles and responsibilities within national quality efforts, support the institutionalisation of a culture of quality, and secure buy-in from health system leaders and stakeholders. The handbook is not a prescriptive process guide but is designed to support teams developing policies and strategies in this area, and very much recognizes the varied expertise, experience and resources available to countries. It outlines eight essential elements to be considered by teams developing national quality policy and strategy: national health goals and priorities; local definition of quality; stakeholder mapping and engagement; situational analysis; governance and organizational structure; improvement methods and interventions; health management information systems and data systems; quality indicators and core measures. The NQPS handbook was co-developed with countries each finding themselves at different stages of the development and execution of national quality policies and strategies and was informed by the review of a sample of more than 20 existing quality strategies across low-, middle- and high-income countries globally.
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Content ArticleA new study developed by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, the WHO Regional Office for Europe and the European Commission draws out lessons for strengthening resilience to future health threats. The Health systems resilience during COVID-19: Lessons for building back better study gathers the evidence on how countries have managed (or not managed) to re-engineer how they work, the ways in which they utilise their resources and the methods they use to face and counter the pressures exerted by both COVID and non-COVID challenges.
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Content ArticleThis World Health Organization (WHO) policy brief takes stock of how digital health tools have been used during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to review what has happened, assess how uptake and use of these tools has been facilitated, identify issues that are emerging, and learn lessons for the longer term to support the sustained use of digital health tools.
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Content ArticleQuality improvement initiatives take many forms, from the creation of standards for health professionals, health technologies and health facilities, to audit and feedback, and from fostering a patient safety culture to public reporting and paying for quality. For policymakers who struggle to decide which initiatives to prioritise for investment, understanding the potential of different quality strategies in their unique settings is key. This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarises available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.
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Content ArticleThe emergence of the omicron variant has raised concerns that the pandemic is not yet over. In this BMJ opinion piece, William et al. outline four key lessons that governments need to learn from to protect against future pandemics
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Content ArticlePatient safety is an integral component of high-quality and effective medical care. The stakes are especially high in oncology, where avoiding errors is imperative to delivering safe and effective radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and other high-risk treatments. Changing paradigms in cancer treatment, including oral chemotherapy, personalised medicine, biosimilars, and immunotherapy, create evolving safety challenges for the oncology community. Moreover, shifting federal healthcare policies could have significant implications for the safety and access to high-quality and effective cancer care for millions of patients with cancer. Challenges and opportunities in ensuring patient access to safe, affordable, and high-quality cancer care remain significant within the policy landscape. To explore current patient safety and access issues in oncology, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) convened the NCCN Policy Summit: Ensuring Safety and Access in Cancer Care in Washington, DC, on June 15, 2017. Oncology stakeholders gathered to discuss pertinent patient safety issues and access implications under the Trump administration, as well as policy and advocacy strategies to address these gaps and build on opportunities moving forward. The programme consisted of presentations and two roundtable discussions with vigorous dialogue and audience comments and questions.
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Content ArticleThe resilience of health systems and cooperation between Member States have become particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the occasion of the French Presidency of the European Union (FPEU) 2022, the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the General Directorate for HealthCare Services of the French Ministry of Health have worked together to produce this special issue of Eurohealth to better understand how health systems have responded to the health crisis and to draw lessons for improving resilience of health systems. (Available in both English and French.)
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Community Post
Better use of data for medication safety in hospitals
Kenny Fraser posted a topic in Medicine management
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NHS hospital staff spend countless hours capturing data in electronic prescribing and medicines administration systems. Yet that data remains difficult to access and use to support patient care. This is a tremendous opportunity to improve patient safety, drive efficiencies and save time for frontline staff. I have just published a post about this challenge and Triscribe's solution. I would love to hear any comments or feedback on the topic... How could we use this information better? What are hospitals already doing? Where are the gaps? Thanks- Posted
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Content ArticleThis procedure describes the Trust wide process of retrospective case review that is to be implemented following an in-hospital death. The document outlines roles and responsibilities and provides guidance on the process of identifying, reviewing, sharing and escalating mortality case reviews.
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Content ArticleThis policy sets out a framework describing how the Trust and its staff will respond to and learn from deaths that occur under their care.It will provide guidance for all staff involved in the mortality review process ensuring clarity on roles, responsibilities and expectations. Reviewing mortality can help make improvements to the quality of care received by patients at the Trust by identifying care related issues. This enables the identification of learning themes and provides evidence of a high standard of care. Mortality is a fundamental component of clinical effectiveness, one of the three dimensions of quality described by Lord Darzi in High Quality Care for all (2008). The Trusts aims are to: Have continuous improvement of our Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMR) and the Trusts Standardised Hospital-Level Mortality Index (SHMI) Achieve a year-on-year reduction in avoidable mortality Improve learning from mortality reviews Ensure robust and timely governance processes regarding mortality outcomes and reviews Provide assurance of mortality processes in the Trust.
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Content Article9.1 million people will be living with major illness by 2040, 2.5 million more than in 2019, according to this new report published by the Health Foundation. The analysis is part of a four-year project led by the Health Foundation’s Real Centre in partnership with the University of Liverpool, focusing on levels of ill health in the adult population in England up to 2040. It lays out the scale and impact of the growth in the number of people living with major illness as the population ages.
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Content ArticleThe International Alliance of Patients’ Organizations (IAPO) is an alliance of patient groups in official relationship with the WHO and is representing the interests of patients worldwide IAPO P4PS Observatory is a single-point global platform for gathering and analysing patients’ expertise and experience to feed evidence to the national, regional and global policies aimed at improving patient and quality of care for patients by the patients.
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Content ArticleThis improvement plan sets out targeted actions to address the prejudice and discrimination – direct and indirect – that exists through behaviour, policies, practices and cultures against certain groups and individuals across the NHS workforce. It has been co-produced through engagement with staff networks and senior leaders.
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Content ArticleThis is the government’s formal response to the recommendations made by the Health and Social Care Committee in its Seventh report - Integrated care systems: autonomy and accountability, published on 30 March 2023. This document also sets out its response to the recommendations made in the Hewitt Review, which was commissioned by the government in November 2022 and published shortly after the committee’s report on 4 April 2023.
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Content ArticleDespite their widespread use, the impact of commissioners’ policies for body mass index (BMI) for access to elective surgery is not clear. Policy use varies by locality, and there are concerns that these policies may worsen health inequalities. This study in BMC Medicine aimed to assess the impact of policies for BMI on access to hip replacement surgery in England. The authors used National Joint Registry data for 480,364 patients who had primary hip replacement surgery in England between January 2009 and December 2019. They found that rates of surgery fell after localities introduced policies restricting access to surgery based on BMI, whereas rates rose in localities with no policy. Localities with BMI policies have higher proportions of independently funded surgery and more affluent patients receiving surgery, indicating increasing health inequalities, and policies enforcing extra waiting time before surgery were associated with worsening mean pre-operative symptom scores and rising obesity. The authors recommend that BMI policies involving extra waiting time or mandatory BMI thresholds are no longer used to reduce access to hip replacement surgery.
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Content ArticleThere has been growing concern about doctors’ conflicts of interests (COIs) but it is unclear what processes and tools exist to enable the consistent declaration and management of such interests. This study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine mapped existing policies across a variety of organisations and settings to better understand the degree of variation and identify opportunities for improvement. The analysis of organisational policies revealed wide variation in what interests should be declared, when and how. This variation suggests that the current system may not be adequate to maintain a high level of professional integrity in all settings and that there is a need for better standardisation that reduces the risk of errors while addressing the needs of doctors, organisations and the public.
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Content ArticleJohn Tingle and Amanda Cattini discuss some recent reports on patient safety and clinical negligence, considering the need for policy makers to look forward as well as to react to crises
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Content ArticleAll countries of the WHO European Region currently face severe challenges related to the health and care workforce (HCWF). This report focuses on identifying effective policy and planning responses to these HCWF challenges across the Region. The report presents an overview of the HCWF situation in the Region (focusing on medical doctors, nurses, midwives, dentists, pharmacists and physiotherapists, for whom data are available) and identifies relevant policy options, their expected benefits and potential facilitators or barriers to successful implementation. Examples of sound evidence-informed practices in countries are also provided. The aim of the report is to describe the data, rather than to analyse. Data supplied by countries have been used, but in many cases these have been incomplete. It is expected that data will grow progressively in future. No data on informal health workers are included.
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News Article
No 10 set for U-turn over mandatory Covid jabs for NHS staff in England
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Downing Street appears likely to drop its policy of dismissing frontline NHS and care staff in England who refuse Covid vaccinations, a minister has strongly indicated, after nursing and care organisations called for this to happen. A decision would be made “in the course of the next few days”, according to Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury. He said the lower severity of the Omicron variant of Covid did “open a space” for the policy to be reversed. The apparent imminent U-turn came as the Royal College of Nursing argued that both the change in severity from Omicron and the number of NHS vacancies meant the mandatory vaccination policy should be dropped. The National Care Association said it would also welcome a change of policy, while warning that many unvaccinated care staff had already lost their jobs in the run-up to the 1 April deadline. Asked about reports of a change to the policy, Clarke told Sky News that ministers had hoped to find “the right balance between having the maximum impact for measures that support public safety in the face of the virus, but also have the minimum impact in terms of our wider freedoms as a society”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 31 January 2022 -
News Article
Unvaccinated man denied heart transplant by Boston hospital
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A US hospital has rejected a patient for a heart transplant at least in part because he is not vaccinated against COVID-19. DJ Ferguson, 31, is in dire need of a new heart, but Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston took him off their list, said his father, David. He said the Covid vaccine goes against his son's "basic principles, he doesn't believe in it". The hospital said it was following policy. Brigham and Women's Hospital told the BBC in a statement: "Given the shortage of available organs, we do everything we can to ensure that a patient who receives a transplanted organ has the greatest chance of survival." A spokesman said the hospital requires "the Covid-19 vaccine, and lifestyle behaviours for transplant candidates to create both the best chance for a successful operation and to optimise the patient's survival after transplantation, given that their immune system is drastically suppressed". The hospital's carefully worded statement may suggest other factors lie beyond the patient's unvaccinated status for his ineligibility, but it refused to discuss specifics, citing patient privacy. Dr Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told CBS News that after any organ transplant a patient's immune system is all but shut down and even a common cold can prove fatal. "The organs are scarce, we are not going to distribute them to someone who has a poor chance of living when others who are vaccinated have a better chance post-surgery of surviving," said Dr Caplan. Read full story Source: BBC News, 26 January 2022 -
News Article
New law to dissolve CCGs and curtail the internal market confirmed
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The government has confirmed its commitment to bring in new health legislation during this Parliament, but social care reform has again been ‘kicked into the long grass’. Today’s Queen’s Speech confirmed that planned, radical changes to the Health and Social Care Bill 2012 will be laid before Parliament this year. The changes, first outlined in the government’s proposals this February, will put integrated care systems on a statutory footing, dissolve clinical commissioning groups, water down the internal market within the NHS and increase the powers the health secretary has over NHS England and the service. Today’s Queen’s Speech said these changes meant “patients will receive more tailored and preventative care, closer to home [and will] empower the NHS to innovate and embrace technology”. However, it did not add any further information to the government’s already stated plans to “bring forward proposals in 2021” for social care reform. The 2019 Queen’s Speech, the first delivered during Boris Johnson’s tenure as prime minister, promised to bring in ”legislation for long-term social care reform in England”. To date, the government has failed to act on this promise. Read full story Source: HSJ, 11 May 2021
