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Content ArticleThis American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) guidance is in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic. Their goal is to provide practices with recommendations that guard the health and safety of their patients and staff, and recognise our social responsibility, as an organisation and as a community of providers and experts, to comply with national public health recommendations.
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News ArticlePrime Minister Boris Johnson has announced plans to test more people for coronavirus. At the moment only people in hospital are being routinely tested, so if you have symptoms and you are not sure if you have the virus, you may well never know. As of 18 March, 56,221 people in the UK had been tested for coronavirus. The number of tests has been rising from just over 1,000 a day at the end of February, when testing began, to more than 6,000 per day by mid-March. The government plans to increase this to 10,000 a day initially, with a goal of reaching 25,000 tests a day. But it has been criticised by some experts for not testing widely enough, and people have been complaining online about not having access to tests despite having symptoms. Public Health England says it will do some surveillance testing on a local level if clusters of cases are identified, using a network of 100 designated GP surgeries. This is to try to get a sense of how many milder cases there are in the community that do not result in hospitalisation. But the UK is not currently doing any mass surveillance testing or actively tracing people who have come into contact with known cases The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he had a "simple message" for all countries: "Test, test, test." He added: "We cannot stop this pandemic if we do not know who is infected." The UK's chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance told a group of MPs that "we simply don't have mass testing available for the population now", and that "when you only have capacity to do a certain number of tests" you have to prioritise the most vulnerable groups. Read full story Source: BBC News, 19 March 2020
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News Article
Testing for coronavirus: what is being done in the UK?
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Who is being tested for coronavirus in the UK? As of last week, when the Prime Minister announced Britain was no longer in the “contain” phase of the pandemic, most testing outside of hospitals stopped. People with symptoms are expected to self-isolate but will not know whether they have COVID-19. That means they will not know if they are immune or still at risk – and a risk to other people. Testing now mostly takes place in hospital. People in intensive care units and those with respiratory illness, especially if it is pneumonia, will get tested for COVID-19. When there is a cluster of infections, such as an outbreak in a care home, those people will also be tested. But the World Health Organization has criticised the approach of countries that are not prioritising testing, with its director general saying “you cannot fight a fire blindfolded … test, test, test”. So why are people with symptoms not being tested? It appears to be a capacity issue, although the Department of Health and Social Care failed to respond to repeated requests for explanation. So far there have been about 44,000 tests in England, which the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told the health select committee put it in “the top three or four countries in terms of testing”. Read full story Source: BBC News, 17 March 2020 -
News Article
NHS staff ‘can access covid-19 testing’, government insists
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
NHS staff are to be given access to testing for covid-19, the government said this morning, but it remains unclear how the policy will be applied. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said at lunchtime: “Our testing regime is set up to provide for those who need tests the most. This includes key workers, such as NHS staff. We will set out more details shortly.” It remains unclear how this will be applied. The announcement follows concerns from healthcare professionals they are not being tested for the virus, even if they had been exposed to infected patients. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 17 March 2020 -
Content ArticleConsultant Mark Gallagher can’t understand why the NHS is not testing its staff for coronavirus. Mark, in a blog published in the Guardian, describes how he is at home with a temperature of 38 and is pretty certain he has Covid-19. But the NHS will not test him for it. Instead, he has paid for a test kit from a private UK clinic and a colleague in China is sending him another. Mark has been in and out of his London hospital every day for the last 28 in a row. In the past couple of weeks he saw maybe 70 people in outpatients.. He cannot understand why the NHS will not test him or other healthcare workers who are put at risk by their work and risk infecting other vulnerable patients in turn, as well as their families. “The policy is that I don’t need to be tested and even the people who have been in contact with me aren’t going to be tested,” he said.
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News ArticleChannel 4 News says they have seen a Public Health England document indicating that not all healthcare and other essential workers with symptoms will be tested because there simply isn’t the capacity to do so – with testing prioritised in order of clinical need. Public Health England say they won’t comment on the contents of a leaked document and it is still subject to ongoing discussions. View full story Source: Channel 4 News, 15 March 2020
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News Article
Coronavirus: NHS to ramp up testing capacity
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
With the number of UK coronavirus cases set to rise, NHS England says it is scaling up its capacity for testing people for the infection. It means 10,000 tests a day can be done – 8,000 more than the 1,500 being carried out currently. Confirmation of any positive test results will be accelerated, helping people take the right action to recover or quickly get treatment. Most of the people tested should get a result back within 24 hours. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be expected to roll out their own testing services, but there will be some shared capacity between nations, depending on need. Read full story Source: BBC News, 11 March 2020 -
News Article
Coronavirus ‘drive through’ testing service
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS is currently rolling out services on NHS sites to test people for coronavirus, including a new service now in action in west London, offering ‘drive through’ coronavirus testing. The new service, provided by Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust in Parsons Green, is only accessed through a referral from NHS 111, and means people worried about the virus can safely and quickly get checked close to home. The model is one of the ways in which community testing and home testing are being rolled out nationwide, with the NHS’ strategic incident director for coronavirus, asking health services in every part of England to set up home and community testing. After being referred through NHS 111, people are invited to an appointment in their car, during which two community nurses carry out a swab in the nose and mouth, which are checked and assessed within 72 hours. People are asked to self-isolate while checks are completed, to prevent any potential onward transmission of the virus. Dr Joanne Medhurst, medical director for Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “Anyone who is worried about coronavirus should call NHS 111 for up to date advice. We’ve set up the ‘drive through’ service to make sure people in our community can get safe, convenient and quick checks for coronavirus, as part of NHS efforts to keep everyone safe." “It’s crucial that, as a community service, we help residents in our area to get accurate, timely advice while managing extra pressure on the NHS, and so far this week we’ve had good feedback from people that the swabbing service offers reassurance at what can be a difficult time.” Read full story Source: NHS England, 28 February 2020 -
Content ArticleEvery clinical laboratory devotes considerable resources to Quality Control (QC). Recently, the advent of concepts such as Analytical Goals, Biological Variation, Six Sigma and Risk Management have generated a renewed interest in the way to perform QC. The objective of this book is to propose a roadmap for the application of an integrated QC protocol that ensures the safety of patient results in the everyday lab routine.
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Content ArticleThe Model Hospital is a digital information service designed to help NHS providers improve their productivity and efficiency. It is an easy to navigate, free tool that can be used by anyone in the NHS, from board to ward.
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Content ArticleA team at South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Middlesbrough developed a programme to raise awareness of acute kidney injury (AKI) and to recognise and treat the condition promptly. Since the programme started there has been a sustained reduction (36%) in AKI cases within the surgical wards at Middlesbrough. This successful programme and pathway has been shared with seven other trusts in the North East of England. As a result of the AKI project and its links to CRAB Clinical Informatics Limited (C-Ci), other NHS Trusts (Imperial, Frimley Park, Wexham Park, North Devon, St Helen’s, Lincoln, Yeovil, Bartholomew’s, The Royal London and Southend) have now also been consulted, meaning this project has the potential for much wider spread. Commonly AKI starts in the community so the team is now focusing on strategies to support primary care to reduce AKI in the community and to harmonise AKI aftercare between hospital and community services. The South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust team was also highly commended in July 2017 at the national Patient Safety Awards.
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Content ArticleThis toolkit supports the implementation of the Structured Judgement Review (SJR) process to effectively review the care received by patients who have died. This will allow learning and support the development of quality improvement initiatives when problems in care are identified. This toolkit also provides information and links to resources on change management and quality improvement methodologies.
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Content ArticleThe Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) have developed this toolkit to disseminate learning highlighted from acute kidney injury (AKI) case notes reviews, part of the RCGP AKI Quality Improvement project. Working with GP practices, they have put together resources, alongside national Think Kidneys guidance, to support the implementation of quality improvement methods into routine clinical practice.
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Content Article
Acute Kidney Injury - Podcast
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in By health and care staff
A podcast discussing blogs from Dr Josh Farkas of the PulmCrit blog on the importance of renal protection in sepsis.
