Knowledge @lert for Friday 30th January

January 30, 2015 Daily News

Funding to get people home from hospital and prevent admissions
The Department for Communities and Local Government, and the Department of Health have announced new funds will be made available for councils to get people home from hospital more quickly and stop people from being admitted in the first place. The new funding is from Department for Communities and Local Government underspends in 2014 to 2015 and will be allocated to 87 councils through ring-fenced grants for social services immediately, weighted towards areas with significant demand for home care packages who have not previously received additional funding this winter.

Hospital admissions from care homes
TheHealth Foundation has publishedFocus on: Hospital admissions from care homes. This report explores whether routinely collected information on hospitalisations from care homes could be used to enhance the understanding of hospital use by care home residents, and thus target areas for shared learning, improvements or regulatory activity.

Working in partnership with Jobcentre Plus to help trusts with recruitment – NHS Employers
South Tees Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has successfully partnered with Jobcentre plus to provide opportunities for participants to work in different areas of the trust.

A data toolkit to improve patient care – The Lancet
Quality of care is a major concern for clinicians, but faced with the complexity of modern health care, assessing how an individual and their team is doing and what they can do to improve can be challenging. To help demystify the process, the UK Royal College of Physicians has published a toolkit that acts as a starting point for clinicians on how to collect and interpret data to improve patient care.

Secondary analysis and literature review of community rehabilitation and intermediate care: an information resource – National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)
This research presents a reanalysis of two merged datasets from intermediate care studies in order to identify patient characteristics associated with outcomes. It provides additional evidence that interdisciplinary teamworking in intermediate care may be associated with better outcomes for patients, but care should be taken with overinterpretation.

NICE evidence summaries: new medicines
NICE has published two new medicines evidence summaries providing a summary of the published evidence for selected new medicines, or for existing medicines with new indications or formulations, that are considered to be of significance to the NHS. The strengths and weaknesses of the relevant evidence are critically reviewed within the summary, but the summaries are not formal NICE guidance. The two summaries are:

NICE key therapeutic topics
NICE has published fourteen Key Therapeutic Topics. These documents summarise the evidence base on topics identified to support the QIPP medicines use and procurement work stream. These are usually therapeutic areas where there are potential opportunities for maintaining or improving quality and improving value.