Government set to release more A&E rescue funding – HSJ
The health service is set to receive a further multimillion pound government bailout aimed at avoiding a politically embarrassing failure of the accident and emergency waiting target during winter

Guest Editorial. Medical Leadership:Development and Practice.
Leadership in Health Services, Volume 27, Issue 4, October 2014.
Articles in this issue include:

• Unique Benefits of Physician Leadership—An American Perspective
  Peter Angood
• Leadership styles used by senior medical leaders: patterns, influences and implications for leadership development
  Ann LN Chapman , David Johnson , Karen Kilner
• Improving Medical Leadership and Teamwork: An Iterative Process
  Stanley J. Smits , Dawn Bowden , Judith A. Falconer , Dale C. Strasser
• Developing Junior Doctors as Leaders of Service Improvement
  Jason Micallef , Brodene Lee Straw
• Embedding Physician Leadership Development within Health Organizations
  Anita J. Snell , Chris Eagle , John Van Aerde
• Professional Medical Leadership: A Relational Training Model
  Geraldine Rose MacCarrick
• Health LEADS Australia and implications for medical leadership
  Andi Sebastian , Liz Fulop , Ann Dadich , Janna Anneke Fitzgerald , Louise Kippist , Anne Smyth

 Contact the Library & Knowledge Service to request any of these articles or Phn. 01704 704202

Checking that doctors have appropriate insurance and indemnity cover – a consultation – General Medical Council (GMC)
The GMC are consulting on changes to regulations that will give new powers to check doctors have appropriate indemnity or insurance cover in place for their practice. The changes being proposed aim to provide further assurance to patients that they will be protected if they need to make a claim about the care they have received.

Positive deviance: a different approach to achieving patient safety – BMJ Quality & Safety current issue 
Patient safety management within healthcare systems globally can feel like a relentlessly negative treadmill. Mortality reviews, incident reporting systems and audits all focus attention on what goes wrong and how often, why errors occur, and who or what is at the root of the problem. Sometimes these methods help us to understand why patients are harmed. However, such ‘find and fix’ approaches tell us little about the presence of patient safety, alerting us instead to itsabsence. These efforts aim to prevent harm by striving to reduce the number of things that go wrong,1 as opposed to identifying instances when—often despite challenging circumstances and limited resources—things go right.

Learning from mistakes in clinical practice guidelines: the case of perioperative {beta}-blockade – – BMJ Quality & Safety current issue 
Introduction: For more than two decades, the role of β-blockers in preventing cardiac complications after surgery has been among the most hotly contested and controversial topics in medical practice. Based on two small randomised trials published in the late 1990s, 2 leading physicians and experts in patient safety embraced preoperative β-blocker initiation as a therapeutic victory for high-risk surgical patients: an apparently simple and effective treatment that promised, for the first time, to prevent life-threatening postoperative cardiac events.

New patient safety collaboratives
A new national programme is being launched by the Secretary of State for Health to improve the safety of patients and ensure continual learning sits at the heart of healthcare in England. The programme, coordinated by NHS England and NHS Improving Quality (NHS IQ), will be the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world. A network of fifteen Patient Safety Collaboratives are being established, each led by an Academic Health Science Network. They will focus on improving safety and empowering patients, carers and staff to highlight, challenge and implement local improvements in patient care.

Missed diagnosis of lung cancer
Research published in the journal Thorax has found that doctors in Britain are “missing opportunities” to spot lung cancer at an early stage, meaning one in three people with the disease dies within 90 days of diagnosis.  What characteristics of primary care and patients are associated with early death in patients with lung cancer in the UK? found that patients who die early from lung cancer are interacting with primary care prediagnosis, suggesting potentially missed opportunities to identify them earlier. A general increase in CXR requests may not improve survival; rather, a more timely and appropriate targeting of this investigation using risk assessment tools needs further assessment.

Branded medicines consultation
The Department of Health has published Consultation on Amendments to the Statutory Scheme to Control the Prices of Branded Health Service Medicines. The consultation is looking for comments on two aspects of the statutory scheme that controls the cost of branded medicines: should there be a further reduction in the maximum price of prescription only, branded health service medicines and should companies record and keep information on actual prices of medicines to provide if the department suspects a breach of the regulations?  Closing date for comments: 7 November 2014.

Loud and clear: making consumer voices heard – Healthwatch
This report details the findings of an investigation into the failings of the complaints system in health and social care. It raises concerns about the NHS and local authority red tape making it difficult for people to complain and that there is not enough independent advice and support out there to help those in need and, above all, the public is given little incentive to come forward about their experiences. It highlights simple changes which could be made to the system in order to improve patients’ experiences in complaints handling within health and care systems.