Contact the Library for further information on any of the topics listed below.

Barts Health Quality Improvement Training – The NHS Academy of Fabulous Stuff
Barts Health’s ‘Safe and Compassionate’ plan recognises the enormous value of staff contributing to improvements in their services. This is underpinned by Listening into Action, and supported by training for staff in Quality Improvement.
We started by providing a three day course ‘Introduction to Quality Improvement’, initially assisted by the AQuA academy. This includes both a toolkit based around the Model for Improvement including good measurement techniques, sustainability and spread, and some supporting theoretical concepts including the role of human factors in error, stakeholder and team engagement and resilience.

Stevens floats ‘combined authorities’ for the NHS – Health Service Journal
The health service could create a form of “combined authorities” bringing together multiple commissioners and providers in order to simplify decision making and service change, Simon Stevens has said. The NHS England chief executive indicated the groups could be formed from sustainability and transformation plan areas in coming months, as part of a “pooling of sovereignty” to implement STPs. Combined authorities have been formed by several groups of local councils in the past five years to join functions across a larger area, the most high profile example being Greater Manchester.

Junior doctors contract agreement – NHS Employers
An agreement on the new junior doctors’ contract has been reached by all parties

New NHS inflation figures underline funding pressures facing the NHS – The King’s Fund Blog
Our latest QMR survey of NHS trust finance directors reveals deepening pessimism about local finances and concern about the outturn for the current financial year. New NHS inflation figures from NHS Improvement reveal the true extent of the financial pressures facing the NHS this year and up to 2020/21.

NHS England sets out local NHS funding growth to 2020 -NHS England
NHS England today published indicative figures for how much each part of England could see its NHS budget grow by 2020, and the funding available for transformation. This will help local NHS and care leaders develop their Sustainability & Transformation plans (STPs), showing how the NHS Five Year Forward View will be implemented locally, using the growing funding envelope available to each area.

How is the NHS performing? May 2016 -The King’s Fund Quarterly Monitoring Report.
The latest quarterly monitoring report from The King’s Fund finds that nearly two-thirds of NHS trusts and more than half of clinical commissioning groups say the quality of patient care in their area has deteriorated over the past year.

‘Not true’ that CCGs must always use competitive tenders, says regulator – Health Service Journal
NHS Improvement has told commissioners that competitive tenders are not always needed to choose a provider, following the introduction of a strict new EU procurement regime.

The 10 Commitments – Professor Jane Cummings, NHS England
The Chief Nursing Officer for England reflects on ‘Leading Change, Adding Value’ the nursing, midwifery and care staff framework she launched yesterday that encourages them to help transform the health and care sector.

Listening again to NHS chief executives – King’s Fund Blog,  Chris Ham
Re-reading our new report on being a chief executive in the NHS, published in partnership with NHS Providers, I was struck by three recurring themes.

• The first is their reflections on the organisation of the NHS. Time and again, those who were interviewed bemoaned the impact of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the complex and fragmented structures that resulted. Their plea was to find a way of simplifying and streamlining these structures, including at a national level, in order to bring back a focus on populations and systems rather than organisations.
• The second is their questioning of the value of commissioning, at least in its current incarnation. Given that most of the chief executives were from providers, this is perhaps not surprising, but their view that commissioning adds cost as well as complexity needs to be taken seriously. At a time when restoring financial balance and finding £22 billion worth of productivity improvements are major priorities, all avenues should be explored.
• The third is their view that the NHS is over regulated. It’s important to understand that they were not arguing that regulation is unnecessary. Rather their view is that the work of the Care Quality Commission, Monitor and others has taken regulation to levels that are difficult to justify, resulting in chief executives and senior colleagues spending much of their time responding to the regulators when they could be employed more productively.

Late mortality after sepsis: propensity matched cohort study –  BMJ 17 May 2016

• To determine whether late mortality after sepsis is driven predominantly by pre-existing comorbid disease or is the result of sepsis itself.
• Sepsis was associated with a 22.1% (95% confidence interval 17.5% to 26.7%) absolute increase in late mortality relative to adults not in hospital, a 10.4% (5.4% to 15.4%) absolute increase relative to patients admitted with non-sepsis infection, and a 16.2% (10.2% to 22.2%) absolute increase relative to patients admitted with sterile inflammatory conditions (P<0.001 for each comparison). Mortality remained higher for at least two years relative to adults not in hospital.
• More than one in five patients who survives sepsis has a late death not explained by health status before sepsis.

Reshaping the workforce – The Nuffield Trust
The Nuffield Trust has published Reshaping the workforce to deliver the care patients need.  This report examines how best NHS staffing can be reorganised to support new ways of delivering care to patients. It finds that equipping the existing non-medical workforce, NHS nursing, community and support staff with additional skills is the best way to develop the capacity of the health service workforce.  The paper provides practical guidance on implementation to those wishing to reshape their workforce, and identify opportunities to ‘grow’ the workforce.

Perinatal mortality surveillance report – The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP)
The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) has published the MBRRACE-UK Perinatal Mortality Surveillance Report: UK Perinatal Deaths for Births from January to December 2014. This report focuses on babies born at 24 weeks of gestation or more.  It found that in 2014 there was a slight fall in both the stillbirth and neonatal death rates compared to 2013 although this pattern was not uniform across the UK.  There remains significant variation across the UK that is not solely explained by factors that influence the rate of death such as poverty, mother’s age, multiple birth and ethnicity.