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  1. Yesterday
  2. Content Article Comment
    Got rid of Hsv, https://prefold2fitted.blogspot.com/2016/01/fold-in-fitted-variations.html
  3. Last week
  4. Event
    At a time when the potential of technological innovation to improve patient safety and patient outcomes is increasingly undeniable, tangible results are still a long way off. Our aim is to provide an opportunity for discussing the missing links that prevent the vision of breakthrough digital solutions from translating into genuine improvements in patient safety and outcomes. It will be held in the prestigious Colegio de Médicos of Madrid. This venue, with its amphitheatres charged with medical history, reflects the ambition we have for this conference: to be a forum that brings together the views of all the stakeholders involved in patient safety in order to achieve concrete improvements. Register
  5. News Article
    A surgeon has been suspended on the same day a hospital review concluded harm had been caused in hundreds of cases. A tribunal ruled that Tony Dixon, who used artificial mesh to treat prolapsed bowels at Southmead Hospital, in Bristol, and the Spire Hospital, still posed a risk. The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service's hearing concluded on Thursday that a six-month suspension was "appropriate". Spire Healthcare has now released its review of Mr Dixon, and found 259 cases where harm had been caused. Health bosses have "apologised sincerely". The majority of harm was in three main areas: the failure to adequately investigate patients prior to offering the procedure; the failure to adequately offer alternative treatments; and poor consent with risks and benefits of the procedure not adequately discussed. The tribunal found Mr Dixon’s fitness to practise is impaired and his suspension would allow him time to "to develop further insight and remediate his misconduct". The General Medical Council brought the case against Mr Dixon, who denies all the allegations and maintains that the procedures were carried out in good faith. His suspension will start immediately. Read full story Source: BBC News, 18 July 2024
  6. Content Article
    The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman's annual report and accounts 2023 to 2024 gives details of its performance over the past 12 months, including financial reports and statistical information about the complaints received.
  7. News Article
    Thousands of GP practices — and some other localised services — are without their IT systems today, due to global outages also affecting banking, media and aviation. All EMIS GP IT systems, which are used by more than half of the 8,000-odd GP practices in England, were down. It was leaving many practices unable to book appointments or consult with patients first thing on Friday morning. This will quickly lead to a backlog of appointments and likely pressure on other urgent care. Patient-facing digital services linked to EMIS also appeared to be down, such as records access via the NHS app. The National Pharmacy Association said some community pharmacy services were down — such as “accessing of prescriptions from GPs and medicine deliveries” were disrupted. It’s unclear if that is also caused by EMIS, or other systems. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 19 July 2024
  8. Content Article
    The National Guardian’s Office (NGO) leads, trains and supports a network of Freedom to Speak Up (FTSU) Guardians in England. It also conducts speaking up reviews to identify learning and support improvement of the speaking up culture of the healthcare sector. This is their updated strategy to support cultural change in healthcare to improve worker experience and patient safety.
  9. Content Article
    Last year, before the publication of Labour's health mission, the Health Foundation set out five tests for political leadership on a whole-government approach to health inequalities. As Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new government starts work, the Health Foundation looks back at those tests and asks: how far they have been met? And what further steps would the new government need to take to meet them? 
  10. News Article
    A fifth of the nursing and midwifery professionals who left the register in the last year did so within 10 years of joining, figures show. Nursing leaders described the statistic as “deeply alarming” and called on ministers to “grasp the nettle and make nursing an attractive career”. The latest Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) annual report on its register of nurses, midwives and nursing associates in the UK shows 27,168 staff left the profession between April 2023 and March 2024, a slight decrease on the previous 12 months. However, 20.3% of the total - or 5,508 - did so within the first 10 years. This is compared to 18.8% in 2020/2021 and “reflects a rise over the last three years”, according to the report. Professor Nicola Ranger, general secretary and chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said: “It is deeply alarming that over 5,000 young, early-career nursing staff chose to quit the profession last year, most vowing never to return. “When the vacancy rate is high and care standards often poor due to staffing levels, the NHS cannot afford to lose a single individual. “New ministers have to grasp the nettle and make nursing an attractive career.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 19 July 2024
  11. Content Article
    The Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC) are the independent regulator for nurses and midwives in the UK and nursing associates in England. Their annual report sets out their objectives, describes what they have achieved during the year and explains their governance, financial resources and future plans. 2023-24 was a difficult year for the NMC during which serious concerns were raised about its culture and regulatory decision making. A review was commissioned by Nazir Afzal OBE and Rise Associates, which highlighted safeguarding concerns and found that people working in the organisation have experienced racism, other forms of discrimination and bullying. The NMC also commissioned two independent investigations by Ijeoma Omambala KC into some of their fitness to practise cases and the way the NMC handled whistleblowing concerns being raised. These will be published later in 2024.
  12. News Article
    BBC reporters are at Queens hospital in Romford, east London, and, like many across the capital it is busy. Really busy. When filming, 17 patients from their A&E were being treated on beds in corridors. Growing numbers of attendances have meant that what was once an emergency measure has now become the norm. Ruth Green is the director of nursing for the emergency department and says corridor care has become "customary practice" When the BBC last filmed the corridor treatments here back in January 2023, the department was seeing 1,400 patients arrive each month by ambulance. Now that number has risen to 2,100. The number of ambulances arriving every day has gone up in a year too, from around 90 per day to around 120. Ruth Green, the director of nursing for the emergency department said: "Unfortunately it is now customary practice to have patients treated on our corridors pretty much all of the time, not every day now it’s the summer, but still far too often." They have had to install new plugs in the corridors so they can operate the hospital beds, new nurse call buttons and a new sink. One patient in a bed in the corridor is Louis Vella. He spent 18 hours in A&E after coming in with chest pains and was eventually transferred to a corridor to wait for a bed on a ward. He said: "It’s not ideal, no, but they are working as best they can with what they’ve got and what else can one ask for?" Read full story Source: BBC News, 19 July 2024 Related reading on the hub: A silent safety scandal: A nurse’s first-hand account of a corridor nursing shift Reflections on a clinical shift: "After 20 years of nursing, this is one of the worst shifts I have ever completed"
  13. Content Article
    In this article, Nicholas T H Farr, research fellow at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield, looks at the need for improved preclinical testing methods to ensure the safety of new medical devices. He highlights cases where lack of testing has led to significant harm to patients and argues that to reduce the risk to patients, the research community needs rigorous and comprehensive testing methods that can more accurately predict how the human body will respond to implantable materials and devices. Nicholas has previously written for the hub, in this blog about the importance of investing in the development of testing methods to ensure medical devices are safe to use.
  14. News Article
    A troubled mental health trust’s internal mortality review has concluded 418 of an estimated 12,503 patient deaths over a four-and-a-half year period were “unexpected and unnatural”. Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust’s leaders said the findings showed there had been a “much, much smaller” number of avoidable deaths than had been implied by previous reviews and reported by the media in the past. But the review’s findings were swiftly dismissed by campaigners, who said they had “no confidence” in the new figures, accused the trust of “corporate gaslighting” and renewed calls for a statutory public inquiry. The review was initiated after a similar exercise by Grant Thornton last June concluded it was not possible to work out how many avoidable deaths there had been because of the trust’s poor data. A month later, BBC Newsnight reported evidence it had watered down criticism in the Grant Thorton report, with allegations of “weak” and “inadequate” governance in earlier versions of the report removed from the final version. The trust and auditor said the changes were due to “fact checking”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 July 2024
  15. News Article
    A woman has said her ovarian cancer diagnosis was delayed after her symptoms were wrongly dismissed as menopause or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) – accusing her doctor of misogyny and medically gaslighting her. Sbba Siddique, a 55-year-old business owner, told The Independent that “unconscious bias and cultural incompetence” were also to blame for her delayed diagnosis. Ms Siddique, who lives in Berkshire, said she began to feel unwell around October 2021 but did not get diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer until March the following year. “I was feeling really tired all the time. I had no energy. I was piling on weight that wasn’t there previously despite not changing my eating habits. I was needing to wee more,” the mother of three recalled. “I was going back and forth with my GP trying to get an appointment. I couldn’t get a face-to-face – every consultation was on the phone or via online forms. That was part of the problem of the misdiagnosis.” Her GP was “very dismissive” of her symptoms and attributed them to IBS or the menopause, she added. “At the end of the day, I’m not the expert, the GP is – I believed him,” she said. Read full story Source: The Independent, 14 July 2024
  16. Content Article Comment
    I can't find that document anymore on NHSE's website. They have a page of resources here: NHS England » Mental health nursing And a contact england.mhworksteams@nhs.net that might be able to help you. There's also the National Mental Health & Learning Disability Nurse Directors Forum, I don't know if they have something similar? MHForum If you do find it, please let us know and we'll update the page. Thanks Sam
  17. Content Article
    The management of acute deterioration following surgery remains highly variable. Patients and families can play an important role in identifying early signs of deterioration it can be difficult for them to effectively contribute to escalation of care. This article looks at a process evaluation of the RESPOND quality improvement programme—Rescue for Emergency Surgery Patients Observed to uNdergo acute Deterioration. It identifies enablers and barriers to the implementation of patient-led escalation systems found during the programme.
  18. Content Article
    Integrated care systems (ICSs) were created to increase collaboration in the health and social care sector and to enable the NHS, local authorities and other partners to take collective responsibility for improving health outcomes, reducing inequalities, delivering better value for money, and driving local social and economic development. This research from the King's Fund examines the development of ICSs by assessing their efforts to develop system-wide approaches to the recruitment, training and retention of staff. The findings are based on 24 in-depth interviews with local leaders in four case study sites plus a series of online workshops.
  19. Event
    Julie Thallon (Chair of Trustees at the Patients Association) and Alf Collins (Trustee of the Patients Association, and NHS England’s former National Clinical Director for personalised care) will be discussing the tools and strategies patients can use to prepare for clinical appointments. They will be discussing how patients can prepare to ask good questions, to actively engage in shared decision-making and to clearly describe their priorities when discussing their healthcare choices. There will be an opportunity for questions and answers. The webinar will be followed by the Patients Association's Annual General Meeting. Register
  20. Content Article
    Workers facing complex environments in the pharmaceutical industry could be helped to reduce risks by taking a different approach to human error. Instead of viewing people as the root of the problems and following a “blame, shame and retrain” model, companies could help to set them up for success using human factors thinking and working proactively. A recent CIEHF webinar on Human and Organisational Performance in Pharma explored the difference that could be made through steps including: Recognising risk and techniques for preventing error. Creating a roadmap for investigating human-related deviations. Improving communication, interviewing and coaching.
  21. News Article
    The former health secretaries Jeremy Hunt and Matt Hancock have been criticised for their failure to better prepare the UK for the pandemic, in a damning first report from the Covid inquiry that calls for an overhaul in how the government prepares for civil emergencies. Hunt, who was the health secretary from 2012-18, and Hancock, who took over until 2021, were named by the chair to the inquiry, Heather Hallett, for failing to rectify flaws in contingency planning before the pandemic, which claimed more than 230,000 lives in the UK. The government had focused largely on the threat of an influenza outbreak despite the fact that coronaviruses in Asia and the Middle East in the preceding years meant “another coronavirus outbreak at a pandemic scale was foreseeable”. Lady Hallett said that to overlook that was “a fundamental error”. “It was not a black swan event,” Hallett said in a 240-page report. It concluded: “The processes, planning and policy of the civil contingency structures within the UK government and devolved administrations and civil services failed their citizens. Ministers and officials were guilty of ‘groupthink’ that led to a false consensus that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic. Never again can a disease be allowed to lead to so many deaths and so much suffering.” In what families bereaved by Covid welcomed as a “hard-hitting, clear-sighted and damning analysis of how and why the UK found itself to be fatally underprepared”, Hallett said “preparedness and resilience for a whole-system emergency must be treated in much the same way as we treat a threat from a hostile state”. The arrival of another pandemic – “potentially one that is even more transmissible and lethal” – was a question of when, not if, she said, and “unless we are better prepared” it would bring “immense suffering and huge financial cost and the most vulnerable in society will suffer most”. Read full story Source: Guardian, 18 July 2024
  22. Content Article
    The Covid-19 Inquiry published its first report and recommendations following its investigation into the UK’s ‘Resilience and preparedness (Module 1)’. The Chair of the Inquiry, Baroness Heather Hallett, set out her recommendations from the Module 1 report in a live streamed statement. It examines the state of the UK’s central structures and procedures for pandemic emergency preparedness, resilience and response. Reports related to the Inquiry’s further Modules will be published later.
  23. News Article
    The NHS should help social care recruit and retain nurses, including with better pay and conditions, particularly for new service models where care staff take on more health tasks. This is among the recommendations in the first workforce plan for adult social care, published by Skills for Care today, which also warns government must not delay promised improvements in staff pay, standards and conditions, while it waits to decide on funding reform. The report also recommends a pay uplift for care staff which it estimates would cost between about £2bn and £6bn a year – but it suggests there would be a significant net benefit overall due to reducing turnover costs and increasing care capacity. The report says integrated care systems should develop joint “one workforce” plans, “align terms and conditions, training and wellbeing support”, and “create the pipeline for registered nurses and nursing associates” to go into care roles. Nursing turnover in care providers is very high and it is thought nurses often leave for NHS jobs with better pay and conditions. However, nursing staff are increasingly needed to supervise “delegated healthcare tasks” for care users with rising acuity. It is an approach government, and many systems, want to grow as part of integrated teams, such as testing and monitoring in “virtual wards”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 July 2024
  24. Content Article
    For the first time ever, the adult social care sector has come together, led by Skills for Care, to develop the Workforce Strategy it needs. Adult social care needs a workforce strategy to ensure we have enough of the right people with the right skills to provide the best possible care and support for the people who draw on it.
  25. News Article
    NHS England has tasked systems and providers with ending or significantly reducing 104-week waits for community mental health services by March 2025, following worsening performance. It was announced in a webinar held by NHSE last week, in which mental health programme directors explained how the new metric would be implemented this autumn. They confirmed that when an integrated care board or provider has a “small number” of 104-week waits, they should work to end them by March, and provide “trajectories” for 78-week and 52-week waits. For those with a “larger number” of long waits, NHSE said ICBs should work with providers to agree an improvement plan throughout the rest of 2024-25. It said they would need to “detail ICB and provider-level trajectories” and submit these soon. It said: “At a minimum, ICBs should ensure that less than 10 per cent of community mental health waits are over 104 weeks.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 July 2024
  26. Event
    until
    Despite the NHS’s global reputation for safe childbirth, efforts to uphold exceptional maternity care standards persist. With a substantial increase in the annual maternity budget by ￡165 million since 2021, the focus remains on strengthening the maternity workforce and advancing neonatal care. This webinar hosted by GovConnect looks at disparities in maternal healthcare. Key Objectives: Understanding the significance of equity and equality in maternity and neonatal care. Acknowledging the influence of cultural norms on pregnancy and childbirth. Tackling disparities in accessing prenatal care and maternal health services among different communities. Fostering inclusivity and cultural competency within healthcare settings to better serve diverse patient groups. Collaborating with community partners to enhance support for expectant mothers and newborns from underserved backgrounds. Implementing strategies for delivering equitable neonatal care and ensuring healthy infant development across diverse populations. Register for the webinar
  27. Content Article
    Teamwork in the operating room is very important for high-quality patient care. It has been shown that increased team member familiarity predicts improved teamwork and is associated with shared mental models and mutual trust, which are in turn important factors for team effectiveness. The aim of this study in Surgery was to investigate the relationship between team member familiarity and perceived team effectiveness in operating room teams. The authors found that greater team member familiarity predicts greater team effectiveness, and this relationship is mediated by shared mental models. They concluded that training should be aimed at these aspects of team functioning to optimise team performance in the operating room.
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