Patient Safety Learning

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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