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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 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 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 ArticleOn 28 August 2020, LongCovid.org and partners sent a letter to Jeremy Hunt, Chair of the Health & Social Care Committee, to ask for the UK Government to assemble a multi-disciplinary Long Covid taskforce to consider: improvements to (continuing) professional education more and better research quality psychosocial and mental health services better public health programmes help for NHS and social care workers to return to work safely funding for patient-led support groups. The full letter can be read via the link below.
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Content ArticleThis blog, published in the BMJ, is written by Editor-in-Chief Alison Twycross and Dr Jake Suett, a staff grade doctor in Intensive Care, who both have suspected Long Covid. They discuss what Long Covid is and discuss some of the employment related issues health care professionals may encounter. They are keen to hear from nurses, midwives and other health care professionals with Long Covid about the issues they are facing. Posts on several of the Long Covid Facebook groups suggest that these issues include: Being denied full sick pay because they haven’t had a positive test for COVID-19 (despite the unavailability of tests and relatively high incidence of false negatives). Employers only applying the COVID-19 enhanced sick pay to staff in the acute phase of illness. Being expected to use annual leave for a phased return to work.
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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 ArticleThe aim of this research study is to better describe and understand the patient experience and recovery of those with confirmed or suspected COVID-19, with a specific emphasis on the Long COVID experience. The focus of this study includes participants’ backgrounds, testing, symptoms, and psychological wellbeing. A secondary aim of this study is to publish patient-driven data in order to advocate for the Long COVID population within the medical community. The survey was created by a group of patients with COVID-19 symptoms who are members of the Body Politic online COVID-19 support group.
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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.
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Content ArticleA framework has been developed by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), Royal College of Midwives and the Society and College of Radiographers, in partnership with NHS England and NHS Improvement, to support maternity services with the local reintroduction of hospital visitors and individuals accompanying women to appointments. This framework has been designed to assist NHS trusts to reintroduce access for partners, visitors and other supporters of pregnant women in English maternity services. It applies to inpatient and outpatient settings. Reintroducing visits is challenging during a pandemic, and the priority must be the safety of all service users (including pregnant women), staff and visitors.
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Content ArticleThis document from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) sets out how health and care systems can ensure that people: are discharged safely from hospital to the most appropriate place. continue to receive the care and support they need after they leave hospital. It replaces ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) hospital discharge service requirements’ published on 19 March 2020.
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Content ArticleThe rate at which nursing and ambulance staff are leaving the NHS is increasing. The number of nurse vacancies has risen to over 40,000 – a record high. The ambulance service has recorded an 80% per cent increase in staff leaving the profession since 2010. These rates are unequally distributed across professions, specialties and geographical regions, introducing inevitable inequalities in patient care. This Efficiency Research project aims to use this variation to detect underlying contributory factors for better or worse nurse and ambulance staff retention, and determine its effect on patient outcomes. A research team from Staffordshire University will use their experience of applying ‘big data’ analytics and unifying large datasets from three previous studies on the effect of nurse staffing on patient safety. Projects began in 2019 and will run until December 2023.
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Content Article
BMJ: Living with COVID-19 (3 September 2020)
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Blogs
In this Editors choice piece from the BMJ, the author discusses the persisting and debilitating symptoms that many sufferers of COVID-19 are experiencing and how some are also facing further challenges of dismissive attitudes from doctors. -
Content ArticleIn this commentary, published by Infectious Diseases, authors argue that more support for research is needed on the trajectory of people recovering from COVID-19.
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Content ArticleIn order to inform clinical and research practice in secondary care in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, an online survey was used to collect public opinions on attending hospitals. The survey link was circulated via the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Public Involvement (PPI) Leads network and social media. Data collection included self-identified risk status due to comorbidity or age, and 100 point Likert-type scales to measures feelings of safety, factors affecting feelings of safety, intention to participate in research, comfort with new ways of working and attitudes to research. Results for feelings of safety scales indicate two distinct groups: one of respondents who felt quite safe and one of those who did not. *Note: This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.
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Content ArticleCancer and multiple non-cancer conditions are considered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as high risk conditions in the COVID-19 emergency. Professional societies have recommended changes in cancer service provision to minimize COVID-19 risks to cancer patients and health care workers. However, we do not know the extent to which cancer patients, in whom multi-morbidity is common, may be at higher overall risk of mortality as a net result of multiple factors including COVID-19 infection, changes in health services, and socioeconomic factors. This paper from Lai et al. predicts estimate of excess deaths in cancer patients related to the COVID-19 emergency using data from England, Northern Ireland and US.
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Content ArticleTo get the safest—and not just the cheapest—devices, the NHS needs to start taking ergonomics seriously, experts say. In March 2020, the UK government commissioned non-medical manufacturers, including Dyson and Renault, to produce ventilators for the excess number of patients expected to have respiratory failure as a result of COVID-19. Because the machines would be used by non-specialist clinicians during the pandemic, NHS England commissioned guidance1 on ergonomic (also known as human factors) design of the ventilators, aimed at achieving “optimum human safety and performance.” However, the commissioning of the ventilator guidance remains an exception rather than the rule. There are, however, signs that the NHS is starting to take human factors seriously—and COVID-19 is a driver.
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Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous strain on health care workers, and its potential impact has implications for the physical and emotional well-being of the workforce. As hospital systems run well over capacity, facing possible shortages of critical care medical resources and personal protective equipment as well as clinician deaths, the psychological stressors necessitate a strong well-being support model for staff. In this commentary, Ripp et al. describe how an MSHS Employee, Faculty, and Trainee Crisis Support Task Force—created in early March 2020 and composed of behavioural health, human resources, and well-being leaders from across the health system—used a rapid needs assessment model to capture the concerns of the workforce related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The task force identified 3 priority areas central to promoting and maintaining the well-being of the entire MSHS workforce during the pandemic: meeting basic daily needs; enhancing communications for delivery of current, reliable, and reassuring messages; and developing robust psychosocial and mental health support options. Using a work group strategy, the task force operationalised the rollout of support initiatives for each priority area. Attending to the emotional well-being of health care workers has emerged as a central element in the MSHS COVID-19 response, which continues to be committed to the physical and emotional needs of a workforce that courageously faces this crisis.
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Content ArticleAllotey et al. determined the clinical manifestations, risk factors, and maternal and perinatal outcomes in pregnant and recently pregnant women with suspected or confirmed COVID-19. The authors found that pregnant and recently pregnant women are less likely to manifest COVID-19 related symptoms of fever and myalgia than non-pregnant women of reproductive age and are potentially more likely to need intensive care treatment for COVID-19. Pre-existing comorbidities, high maternal age, and high body mass index seem to be risk factors for severe COVID-19. Preterm birth rates are high in pregnant women with covid-19 than in pregnant women without the disease.
