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Patient Safety Learning

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  1. Patient Safety Learning
    Health Secretary Matt Hancock admits he is "worried" about the long-term impacts of coronavirus on those who have been infected.
    Mr Hancock said a "significant minority" of people had suffered "quite debilitating" conditions after contracting COVID-19.
    It comes after Sky News reported on how psychosis, insomnia, kidney disease, spinal infections, strokes, chronic tiredness and mobility issues are being identified in former coronavirus patients in northern Italy.
    Asked about the long-term impact of the disease on patients, the health secretary told Sky News: "I am concerned there's increasing evidence a minority of people - but a significant minority - have long-term impacts and it can be quite debilitating. "So we've set up an NHS service to support those with long-term impacts of COVID-19 and, also, we've put almost £10m into research into these long-term effects."
    Read full story
    Source: Sky News, 15 July 2020
  2. Patient Safety Learning
    Waiting lists for treatment in 2019 were at record levels, with the proportion of patients waiting less than 18 weeks for treatment at its lowest level in a decade.
    Cancer waiting times were the worst on record, with 73% of trusts not meeting the 62-day cancer target. Waiting for diagnostic tests was at the highest level since 2008: 4.2% of patients were waiting over six weeks against a target of less than 1%.
    On 17 March 2020, NHS England and NHS Improvement asked trusts to postpone all non-urgent elective operations to free up as much inpatient and critical care capacity as possible. At this point, there were 4.43 million people on waiting lists for consultant-led elective treatment.
    It is imperative that we open a national debate on what the NHS can deliver in a resource-constrained environment. To translate into action, this must involve patients, clinicians, system and regional leaders, the public and politicians. Such a debate is long overdue: current methods for prioritising elective care, such as referral to treatment or the 62-day cancer standard, are no longer fit for purpose.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 14 July 2020
  3. Patient Safety Learning
    The NHS have duped thousands of women into believing the most common incontinence mesh operation is safe, by not adding loss of sex life into its risk figures, campaigners say.
    The move keeps figures low so surgeons can reassure women that it is a safe day case operation.
    The discovery is buried in a report from five years ago, and when questioned on it, the MHRA, tasked with making sure implants are safe for patients, passed the buck and blamed the report authors.
    The revelation comes after a debate in Westminster, where health minister Jackie Doyle Price said there was not enough evidence to suspend the plastic implants and quoted a risk of 1-3%.
    However, those figures were blown out of the water just weeks before the debate in a landmark study using the NHS’s own hospital re-admission figures which show TVT mesh tape risk is at least 10%.
    Campaigners say even that is not a reflection of the true scale of the mesh disaster because it does not take into account women going to doctors for pain medication or those suffering in silence.
    Read full story
    Source: Cambs Times, 31 October 201t
  4. Patient Safety Learning
    People with non-life threatening illnesses will be told to call before going to Wales' biggest A&E department. Patients will be assessed remotely and given a time slot for the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff if needed.
    Hospital bosses feel returning to over-crowded waiting rooms would provide an "unacceptable" risk to patients due to coronavirus.
    The system is set to start at the end of July, but will not apply to people with serious illnesses or injuries.
    Details are still being discussed by Cardiff and Vale health board, but patients with less serious illnesses or injuries will be told to phone ahead, most likely on the 24-hour number used to contact the local GP out-of-hours service. They will be assessed by a doctor or a nurse and, depending on the severity of the condition, will either be given a time window to go to A&E or be directed to other services.
    This system was introduced in Denmark several years ago.
    "This is all about being safe and ensuring that emergency medicine and emergency care is safe and not about putting barriers in place to those more vulnerable people," says the department's lead-doctor Dr Katja Empson.
    "What we really think is that by using this system, we'll be able to focus our attention on those vulnerable groups when they do present."
    If successful, the system could become a long-term answer to reducing pressures on emergency medicine, she added.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 14 July 2020
  5. Patient Safety Learning
    Across the country there have been reports of “do not resuscitate” (DNR) orders being imposed on patients with no consultation, as is their legal right, or after a few minutes on the phone as part of a blanket process.
    Laurence Carr, a former detective chief superintendent for Merseyside Police, is still angry over the actions of doctors at Warrington Hospital who imposed an unlawful “do not resuscitate” order on his sister, Maria, aged 64.
    She has mental health problems and lacks the capacity to be consulted or make decisions and has been living in a care home for 20 years. As her main relative, Mr Carr found out about the notice on her records only when she was discharged to a different hospital a week later.
    Maria had been admitted for a urinary tract infection at the end of March. Although she has diabetes and an infection on her leg her condition was not life threatening.
    Mr Carr said: “My sister has no capacity to effectively be consulted due to her mental illness and would not understand if they did try to explain, so I was furious that I had not been consulted."
    He later learnt that the reason given by the hospital for imposing the DNR was "multiple comorbitidies".
    In a statement, Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust said it was fully aware of the law, which was reflected in its policies and regular training.
    It said: “We did not follow our own policy in this case and have the requisite discussions with the family. The template form which was completed in this case indicates that discussion with the family was ‘awaiting’. Regretfully due to human error this did not occur."
    Mr Carr and his sister are not alone. National charity Turning Point said it had learnt of 19 inappropriate DNARs from families, while Learning Disability England said almost one-fifth of its members had reported DNARs placed in people’s medical records without consultation during March and April.
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 14 July 2020
  6. Patient Safety Learning
    A wide disparity in coronavirus mortality rates has emerged in English hospitals, with data seen by the Guardian showing that one hospital trust in south-west England had a death rate from the disease of 80% while in one London trust it was just 12.5%.
    The figures, which NHS England has compiled but never published, show the age-standardised mortality rates that all of the country’s 135 acute hospital trusts have recorded during the pandemic. Doctors regard age as the single biggest predictor or risk factor for dying from COVID-19.
    They cover the period from the start of the coronavirus crisis in March, through its peak in late March and April, up until 15 May, by which time 42,850 (85%) of the 50,219 deaths so far in all settings had occurred in England and Wales.
    It is the first such data to emerge about how many people have lived or died in each trust after being treated there because they had been left critically ill by the disease. They are based on patients who were treated in an intensive care or high-dependency unit or on a ward.
    Senior doctors said the dramatic gap in death rates of 67.5 percentage points between the trusts with the highest and lowest rates was notable and may mean that some hospitals needed to learn lessons from others.
    Read full story
    Source: Guardian, 14 June 2020
  7. Patient Safety Learning
    Five NHS trusts in the South West have been ordered to make immediate improvements after the death of a 20-year-old prisoner who needed healthcare.
    Lewis Francis was arrested in Wells, Somerset, in 2017 after stabbing his mother while “acutely psychotic” and taken into custody. Although his condition mandated a transfer to a medium secure mental health hospital, there was “no mechanism” in place to move Mr Francis and he was taken to prison, where he died by suicide two days later, according to a coroner.
    Contributory factors to his death included “insufficient collaboration, communication and ownership between and within organisations… together with insufficient knowledge of… the Mental Health Act,” according to Nicholas Rheinberg, the assistant coroner for Exeter and Greater Devon.
    In a Prevention of Future Deaths report, Mr Rheinberg said a memorandum of understanding was in place for the transfer of “mentally ill prisoners direct from police custody” in the West Midlands, and he called on the South West Provider Collaborative to agree a similar deal with “relevant organisations and agencies”.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 14 July 2020
  8. Patient Safety Learning
    Only two out of 23 recommendations from a royal college review into a trust’s troubled maternity services can be shown to be fully implemented, a new investigation has revealed.
    A learning and review committee, set up by East Kent Hospitals University Foundation Trust, found that 11 more of the recommendations from a 2016 review by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) were “partially” implemented.
    But it said there was either no evidence the remaining 10 had been delivered, or there was evidence they were not implemented.
    The original RCOG review looked at a number of cases where babies had died as well as broader issues within the maternity service at the trust.
    The committee was set up after an inquest into the death of Harry Richford, who died a week after his birth in 2017 at the trust’s Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Hospital in Thanet. Many of the issues which came to light at his inquest echoed those from the RCOG report.
    Committee chair Des Holden, medical director of Kent Surrey Sussex Academic Health Science Network, highlighted the difficulties in tracking evidence and action plans during a time when the trust had significant changes in leadership. But he said the committee felt cases where evidence could not be found or the standard of evidence gave concern, the recommendations could not be said to be met.
    Derek Richford, Harry’s grandfather, said on behalf of the family: “We are saddened and shocked to find that over four years after the RCOG found fundamental systemic failings and made 23 recommendations, only two have been completed. It is not good enough for them to now say ‘leadership has changed’. The main board must take responsibility and be held to account.”
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 13 July 2020
  9. Patient Safety Learning
    A former senior NHS official plans to sue the organisation after he had to pay a private hospital £20,000 for potentially life-saving cancer surgery because NHS care was suspended due to COVID-19.
    Rob McMahon, 68, decided to seek private treatment after Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS trust told him that he would have to wait much longer than usual for a biopsy. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer after an MRI scan on 19 March, four days before the lockdown began.
    McMahon was due to see a consultant urologist on 27 March but that was changed to a telephone consultation and then did not take place for almost two weeks.
    “At that appointment, the consultant said: ‘Don’t worry, these things are slow-growing. You’ll have a biopsy but not for two or three months.’ I thought, ‘that’s a long time’, so decided to see another consultant privately for a second opinion.”
    A PET-CT scan confirmed that he had a large tumour on both lobes of the prostate and a biopsy showed the cancer was at risk of breaking out of the prostate capsule and spreading into his body. He then paid to undergo a radical prostatectomy at a private Spire hospital.
    “This is care that I should have had on the NHS, not something that I should have had to pay for myself. I had an aggressive cancer. I needed urgent treatment – there was no time to waste,”, he said. “With the pandemic, he added, “it was almost like a veil came down over the NHS. He worked for the NHS for 17 years as a manager in hospitals in London, Birmingham and Redditch, Worcestershire, and was the chief executive of an NHS primary care trust in Leicester.”
    Mary Smith of Novum Law, McMahon’s solicitors, said: “Unfortunately, Rob’s story is one of many we are hearing about from cancer patients who have been seriously affected by the disruption to oncology services as a result of COVID-19."
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 11 July 2020
     
  10. Patient Safety Learning
    Coronavirus patients have continued to suffer from fatigue, breathlessness and forgetfulness more than 100 days after contracting the bug. Many COVID-19 survivors have found that they are not back to normal months after they tested positive.
    Louise Nicholls, from Litherland in Liverpool, is one of those people who found themselves suffering from curious symptoms long after she should have been back to normal.
    She was told she had coronavirus by her doctor on 1 April having gone in search of medical help after suffering from a number of respiratory symptoms. "I was trying to do my workouts and I was getting really short of breath," Louise said.
    "I couldn't put my finger on what was going on but it got worse every day. My chest started getting tighter and my lungs were burning. I didn't have a cough or a fever but I had shortness of breath and I was waking up with night sweats."
    Louise said her symptoms were dismissed as anxiety by those around her at first, but when her symptoms got worse she phoned the doctor who said it sounded like coronavirus.
    Louise said: "My doctor said it sounds like covid. She said 'you're young and fit, you'll be over it in a few weeks' and sent me on my way."
    Louise's breathing continued to get worse and she was given a steroid inhaler, which she is still taking today. Although Louise feels much better than she did at one time, she is still struggling with her breathing today and is continuing to use her inhaler.
    She said: "I feel much better than I was but I can't push myself too much... My chest feels tight if I don't take my inhaler every day."
    Read full story
    Source: Mirror, 12 July 2020
  11. Patient Safety Learning
    Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.
    Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK COVID-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.
    The cases, published in the journal Brain, revealed a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept through Britain. At UCL’s Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three per week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication.
    “We’re seeing things in the way Covid-19 affects the brain that we haven’t seen before with other viruses,” said Michael Zandi, a senior author on the study and a consultant at the institute and University College London Hospitals NHS foundation trust.
    “What we’ve seen with some of these Adem patients, and in other patients, is you can have severe neurology, you can be quite sick, but actually have trivial lung disease,” he added.
    Read full story
    Source: The Guardian, 8 July 2020
  12. Patient Safety Learning
    Pharmacies are warning people are at risk of not getting the flu jab unless an urgent decision is made over the winter vaccination programme.
    The Company Chemists’ Association, which represents large pharmacy groups, told HSJ the government and NHS England need to “urgently” clarify how many people it wants vaccinated for flu this year, as well as making changes to regulations.
    An expanded and successful winter vaccine programme is seen as key to avoiding potentially catastrophic demand for hospital beds, with flu demand coinciding with covid-19 surges.
    Malcolm Harrison, chief executive, said: “We need decisions made now. We have an ongoing dialogue with NHS England but they seem to be waiting on secretary of state’s decision on which groups need vaccinating. That is something [the health secretary, Matt Hancock] needs to make a decision about very, very soon.”
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 10 July 2020
  13. Patient Safety Learning
    Relatives of care home residents with dementia should be treated as key workers, leading charities say.
    In a letter to the health secretary, they write that the care given by family members is "essential" to residents' mental and physical health.
    They argue the current limits on visitors have had "damaging consequences" and they want visits to resume safely, with relatives given the same access to care homes and coronavirus testing as staff.
    Signed by the bosses of leading charities including Dementia UK and the Alzheimer's Society, the letter calls on the government to "urgently" address what it calls the "hidden catastrophe" happening in care homes.
    The charities say that this "enforced separation" has caused a "deterioration" in residents' mental and physical health, particularly for those living with dementia - who make up more than 70% of the population of care homes.
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 9 July 2020
  14. Patient Safety Learning
    Daniel Mason was born half a century ago without hands, with missing toes, a malformed mouth and impaired vision.
    From an early age, he and his family had to deal with people asking about his disabilities. The impact on his life has been considerable.
    Daniel’s mother Daphne long suspected the cause of his problems was a powerful hormone tablet called Primodos that was given to women to determine whether they were pregnant. But when she raised her concerns with doctors, they were dismissed.
    Now, at last, Daphne has been vindicated with official confirmation this week that her fears were right, in the landmark review by Baroness Cumberlege into three separate health scandals that has exposed a litany of shameful failings by the NHS, regulatory authorities and private hospitals.
    This damning report shows again the danger of placing a public service on a pedestal, with politicians happy to spout platitudes but scared to tackle systemic problems or confront the medical establishment.
    But how many more of these inquiries must be held? How many more disturbing reports and reviews must be written?
    How many more times must we listen to ministerial apologies to betrayed patients? How much more must we hear of ‘lessons being learned’ when clearly they are largely ignored?
    Read full story
    Source: Mail Online, 9 July 2020
  15. Patient Safety Learning
    Far fewer people are having surgery or cancer treatment because COVID-19 has disrupted NHS services so dramatically, and those who do are facing the longest waits on record.
    NHS figures reveal huge falls in the number of patients who have been going into hospital for a range of vital care in England since the pandemic began in March, prompting fears that their health will have worsened because diseases and conditions went untreated.
    Patients have been unable to access a wide range of normal care since non-COVID-19 services were suspended in hospitals in March so the NHS could focus on treating the disease. Many patients were also afraid to go into hospital in case they became infected, which contributed to a fall in treatment volumes.
    Tim Gardner, a senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation thinktank, said: “The dramatic falls in people visiting A&E, urgent referrals for suspected cancer and routine hospital procedures during lockdown are all growing evidence that more people are going without the care they need for serious health conditions."
    “Early diagnosis and prompt treatment of cancer is crucial to saving lives, and delays in referrals and treatment during the pandemic are likely to mean more people are diagnosed later when their illness is further advanced and harder to treat.”
    Read full story
    Source: Guardian, 9 July 2020
  16. Patient Safety Learning
    The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has published its response to the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review.
    In its response, the MHRA said: “Today’s publication of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review is of profound importance for the MHRA, since the safety of the public is our first priority."
    "We therefore take this report and its findings extremely seriously. Throughout the Review’s work we have listened intently to the many distressing experiences of women and their families. We will now carefully study the findings and recommendations of the Report.
    We recognise that patient safety must be continually protected and that many of the major changes recommended by the Review cannot wait. We are therefore making changes without delay to ensure that we listen to patients and involve them in every aspect of our work.
    We are already taking steps to strengthen our collaboration with all bodies in the healthcare system and will strive to ensure that, working with these other bodies, the safety changes we advise are embedded without delay in clinical practice.
    We wholeheartedly commit to demonstrating to those patients and families who have shared their experiences during the Review, and anyone else who has suffered, that we have learned from them and are changing and improving because of what they have told us. We are determined to put patients and the public at the heart of everything we do."
    Read full statement
    Source: GOV.UK, 8 July 2020
  17. Patient Safety Learning
    Patients with respiratory disease have been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the NHS storing up problems for the winter months, a group of experts including the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has warned.
    Analysis by the 34-member Taskforce for Lung Health showed that referrals for lung conditions fell by 70% in April, with two-in-five (39%) of CCGs seeing no appointment bookings for respiratory conditions for the whole of May.
    On average, the group calculated a weekly average of 3,399 lung patients missing out on urgent and routine referrals during the COVID-19 lockdown, amounting to a total of at least 34,780 people, based on NHS England data.
    This was blamed in part on a general reduction in routine procedures during the pandemic, which will have affected all disease areas, but also the limitations on clinicians including GPs to carry out spirometry due to the risk of COVID-19 infection spread.
    But the taskforce - which includes the RCGP and the Primary Care Respiratory Society, as well as the Royal College of Physicians and Asthma UK - is now calling on NHS England to urgently restore services to pre-pandemic levels to tackle the backlog of lung patients requiring support. It said that failure to do so risked causing the premature death of patients who require urgent diagnosis as well as overwhelming the NHS during the winter season, when respiratory symptoms worsen.
    Read full story
    Source: Pulse, 9 July 2020
  18. Patient Safety Learning
    CAP-COVID are conducting essential research on how the COVID-19 pandemic affects pregnant women and their babies. If you are a pregnant woman at any stage of pregnancy, you can take part in the study. This includes whether you have just had a positive pregnancy test (even if you are unsure what to do about your pregnancy), whether you are in the middle of pregnancy, or you are about to have your baby.
    Take part
  19. Patient Safety Learning
    Health leaders have called for the routine recording of ethnicity and faith during the registration of deaths to help fight COVID-19, but the government appears to have rejected the idea.
    Leaders at West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership, the second largest integrated care system in England, wrote to registrar general Abi Tierney last month and said the lack of routine collection and analysis of this data “means there is a structural barrier to understanding of inequalities in mortality”.
    The Home Office replied and said it is considering “a range of reliable and proportionate ways to collect the necessary information”. But HSJ understands the Home Office has indicated no immediate action will be taken on the issue.
    The letter said: “This absence has undoubtedly led to delays in identifying the inequalities of COVID-19 mortality and means that we remain unclear about the disparities in deaths outside of hospital. These delays have risked contributing to further loss of life in our places in recent weeks, as we have not had robust data to enable us to address impacts at sufficient pace as we have been dealing with this crisis.”
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 8 July 2020
  20. Patient Safety Learning
    Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned ministers not to let the Cumberlege review “gather dust on a shelf”.
    The chair of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee told The Independent it was vital action was taken to implement the recommendations.
    Mr Hunt, who made patient safety a key focus of his tenure as health secretary, backed the idea of an independent patient safety commissioner that would be outside the NHS and have powers to advocate for patient issues.
    Mr Hunt said: “This report should be a powerful wake-up call that our healthcare system is still too closed, defensive and focused on blame rather than learning lessons. It’s truly harrowing to hear of all the women and families who live with permanent anguish because of these medicines and devices, and it has clearly taken too long for their voices to be heard.”
    “The NHS is one of the safest health systems in the world, and we’re all rightly in awe of our frontline heroes. But in healthcare getting it right ‘most’ times isn’t good enough because the exceptions wreak lifelong devastation on families. So we must not allow this seminal report to gather dust on a shelf: lessons must be learnt once and for all.”
    Read full story
    Source: The Independent, 8 July 2020
  21. Patient Safety Learning
    The Care Quality Commission (CQC) staged an unannounced inspection after two deaths at a mental health unit which it had condemned as “not fit for purpose.”
    Two earlier CQC inspections – in 2017 and 2018 – had also been prompted by deaths on the same unit.
    The CQC visited the Abraham Cowley Unit, which is at St Peter’s Hospital in Chertsey and run by Surrey and Borders Partnership Foundation Trust, on 26 June. Two inpatients died in April and May on an inpatient ward for working age men.
    The deaths both involved “ligature harm” and have led to the trust reviewing its ligature minimisation strategy, according to board papers.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: HSJ, 8 July 2020
  22. Patient Safety Learning
    The Public Accounts Committee has given the Department of Health and Social Care two months to report back with a plan to ensure personal protective equipment (PPE) provision during a second COVID-19 spike.
    The influential group of MPs said they were 'extremely concerned' by PPE shortages faced by NHS and care workers during the first wave of the pandemic in the UK.
    According to the DHSC it never ran out of stock of PPE but rather Covid-19 had 'put supply chains and distribution networks under unprecedented strain', posing challenges with ensuring the right equipment was at the right place at the right time.
    BMA council chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: 'We may be past the first peak of this virus, but we should be under no illusion that the demand for PPE is over – especially as the NHS begins to manage the huge backlog of demand caused by the pandemic, all under tighter infection control measures.'
    In light of the threat of a second wave of Covid-19 doctors and colleagues 'need cast-iron guarantees from Government that the failures of the past months will not be repeated, that there will be enough of the right PPE and that it will be properly tested, quality-controlled and safe to use', Dr Nagpaul added.
    Read full story
    Source: Pulse, 8 July 2020
  23. Patient Safety Learning
    Urgent cancer referrals were "inappropriately" rejected by hospitals during the coronavirus lockdown without tests being carried out, GPs have said. 
    Cancer Research UK said the findings from a survey of more than 1,000 GPs were "alarming", warning that patients whose lives may be at risk were being left "in limbo".
    Family doctors were surveyed in June and asked what had happened to patients they had referred to hospitals for tests in the month to that point because cancer was suspected. 
    A quarter of GPs said urgent referrals had been inappropriately turned down by hospitals more often than had been the case before the pandemic.  
    Four in 10 said that, when tests were refused, patients had been left without proper checks to see whether their case could safely be left without investigation.
    Read full story (paywalled)
    Source: The Telegraph, 8 July 2020
  24. Patient Safety Learning
    Many lives have been ruined because officials failed to hear the concerns of women given drugs and procedures that caused them or their babies considerable harm, says a review.
    More than 700 women and their families shared "harrowing" details about vaginal mesh, Primodos and an epilepsy drug called sodium valproate. Too often worries and complaints were dismissed as "women's problems". It says arrogant attitudes left women traumatised, intimidated and confused.
    June Wray, 73 and from Newcastle, experienced chronic pain after having a vaginal mesh procedure in 2009.
    "Sometimes the pain is so severe, I feel like I will pass out. But when I told GPs and surgeons, they didn't believe me. They just looked at me like I was mad."
    The chairwoman of the highly critical review, Baroness Julia Cumberlege, said the families affected deserved a fulsome apology from the government.
    She said: "I have conducted many reviews and inquiries over the years, but I have never encountered anything like this; the intensity of suffering experienced by so many families, and the fact that they have endured it for decades. Much of this suffering was entirely avoidable, caused and compounded by failings in the health system itself."
    Read full story
    Source: BBC News, 8 July 2020
  25. Patient Safety Learning
    PRESS RELEASE
     (London, UK, 6 July 2020) – Thousands of ‘Long COVID’ patients are feeling unheard and unsupported. The charity Patient Safety Learning is giving these patients a voice to ensure urgent action is taken by leaders in health and social care.
     Helen Hughes, Chief Executive of Patient Safety Learning, said: “There is growing evidence that there are many patients recovering in the community with long-lasting symptoms who are feeling abandoned, confused and without support. We must take action to better understand the needs of these patients and provide them with safe and effective care.”
     Although Patient Safety Learning welcomes the recent government announcement of an online patient recovery portal and treatment plans, questions remain around whether this will meet the specific health needs of Long COVID patients. “These patients have felt unheard for too long; we must make sure they do not slip through the net,” adds Hughes.
     Long COVID patients are those with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 who continue to struggle with prolonged, debilitating and sometimes severe symptoms months later*.
     It is crucial that Long COVID patients are heard and supported, and that research is undertaken to better understand Long COVID and its long-term effects on physical and mental health. 
     Long COVID patient Barbara Melville told Patient Safety Learning, “the worst part is that I’ve had to fight so hard to get the referrals I need” and another, Dr Jake Suett, said that, after joining the ‘Long Covid Support Group’ on Facebook, he “was suddenly faced with the realisation that there were thousands of us in the same position” and that it confronted him “with the tremendous volume of genuine human suffering that was going unrecorded and unnoticed”.
     Patient Safety Learning is calling for leaders in health and social care to act urgently by funding research into Long COVID and ensuring that patients are given a platform to raise concerns and receive appropriate support.
     The charity has identified the current key issues as being:
     There is a lack of guidance and support for Long COVID patients who have been managing their illness and recovery from home (to date, much of the guidance has been designed specifically for patients who have been acutely unwell and in hospital).
    There is a lack of understanding around the effects of Long COVID on patients’ mental health and wellbeing. There is a risk that symptoms of other serious conditions are being overlooked for individuals with Long COVID and, instead, are being attributed simply as after-effects of COVID-19.  Patient Safety Learning’s proposed actions to address the safety issues concerning Long COVID care can be found on our website.
    Notes to editors:
    *The symptoms for those with Long COVID vary greatly but many are experiencing rashes, shortness of breath, neurological and gastrointestinal problems, abnormal temperatures, cardiac symptoms and extreme fatigue.
    Patient Safety Learning is a charity, which helps transform safety in health and social care, creating a world where patients are free from harm. We identify the critical factors that affect patient safety and analyse the systemic reasons they fail. We use what we learn to envision safer care. We recommend how to get there. Then we act to help make it happen. For more information: www.patientsafetylearning.org  Patient Safety Learning’s blog published today on patient safety concerns for Long COVID patients outlining these issues in more detail can be found here.  A blog by Dr Jake Suett published today in which he outlines his experience of suspect Long COVID calls needed can be found here.  An open letter from Dr Jake Suett to MPs to make clear the needs of this group can be found here.
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