Knowledge @lert for Friday 21st August

August 21, 2015 CCG Daily News

Nurses could ‘walk away’ from NHS over pay restraint – Health Service Journal
Nurses could ‘walk away’ from the NHS in the face of four more years of pay restraint, the new chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing has told HSJ.

E-cigarettes evidence update
Public Health England has published E-cigarettes: an evidence update. This review explains the relative risks and benefits of e-cigarettes, in terms of harm reduction when compared with cigarettes and as an aid to quitting.  E-cigarettes are 95% less harmful to health than normal cigarettes. When supported by a smoking cessation service, they help most smokers to quit tobacco altogether.

Ranking hospitals on avoidable death rates derived from retrospective case record review: methodological observations and limitations – BMJ Quality & Safety, Abel, G., Lyratzopoulos, G.
Reducing the number of avoidable deaths in hospital is the focus of many quality improvement initiatives worldwide.1 Comparing indicators of avoidable mortality between different hospitals could help to target improvement efforts, but optimally defining and measuring hospital deaths that could be deemed preventable remains a challenge.2 Unlike performance comparisons based on hospital standardised mortality ratio (HSMR), a new policy initiative announced by the UK Government will rank hospitals for avoidable mortality based on case reviews of 2000 deaths in English hospitals each year. Although this initiative aims to overcome limitations of current policies, two statistical properties of the proposed approach mean that it is unsuitable for classifying hospital performance.

Open standards publishing: an implementation plan – Department of Health
This document sets out the current position with regard to the publication and sharing of external documents. It also describes the Department of Health’s plan to become fully compliant with open format standards.

National officials tell hospitals seven day service priorities – Health Service Journal 
Hospitals have been told by national officials to focus on improving access to medical consultants and diagnostic services as part of efforts to improve care for NHS patients at weekends.

  • National bodies tell trusts to focus on four specific clinical standards for seven day services
  • Letter says standards have “most impact on reducing weekend mortality”
  • Trusts expected to report on seven day working progress from next month

Community healthcare needs more prominence – Health Service Journal
There is no doubt hospital care is essential but community services must also be made an important part of the system. A new vision to recognise and expand its role in commissioning and governance is needed. Community health services used to be most people’s experience of healthcare. But one of the aspects of modern medicine’s wondrous advance has been that its technical and scientific achievements were concentrated in institutions.

FT finance: Winners and losers of education and training income – Health Service Journal 
We reveal the biggest winners and losers of education and training income since 2012-13.

  • Change in tariff for education and training places benefits smaller FTs
  • Eight Shelford Group trusts’ training income down £15m over two years
  • UCLH says losses should be recognised in main clinical tariffs
  • Third in our series looking at the state of FT finances

CCG blames NHS Shared Business Services for missing financial target – Health Service Journal
Telford and Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Group has blamed NHS Shared Business Services for an error which caused the CCG to fail to meet its cash balance target in June, according to board documents.  Since January, the CCG has had a target to have a maximum cash balance at the end of each month of no more than 1.25 per cent of that drawn down in the month.

Is the NHS delivering enough of the right things? – The King’s Fund
Last week I wrote a blog about the problem of overuse in the NHS: where people get services they don’t want or need, which can lead to unnecessary harm and wasted resources. But this is only part of the story. The flipside is that the NHS faces the problem of underuse too.

Statistics

Bulletins

Knowledge @lert for Tuesday 18th August

Knowledge @lert for Friday 11th September