NHS: spending watchdog questions claims of £5.8bn savings: Repeated claims by ministers that the NHS made almost £6bn of productivity gains last year have been questioned by the public spending watchdog, which suggested that savings had been much smaller, reported The Guardian. The National Audit Office (NAO) said it could only verify £3.4bn of the £5.8bn efficiency savings supposedly achieved by the NHS in England in 2011-12. Ministers have maintained that the NHS made £5.8bn of the £5.9bn savings expected in 2011-12, the first year of the savings drive. However, the NAO takes the Department of Health to task for not doing more to check that NHS organisations’ claimed savings actually occurred. It has no way of knowing if NHS primary care trusts’ claims about savings are true because it “does not validate or gain independent assurance about the data provided,” the NAO said.
NHS to benefit from information sharing challenge funding to develop new digital services: The Department of Health Informatics Directorate has announced 43 IT projects from across the NHS are to benefit from £2.2m funding to develop new digital services that improve patient care and can be used to share information more easily across the NHS. The Department of Health received 95 applications for the Information Sharing Challenge Fund asking for a total of £5.6m. Of those awarded; 25 are clinical correspondence projects; seven are admission, discharge and transfer projects; five are related to telehealth; four are health and social care projects; and two are dashboard projects. The principal requirements for projects to be eligible is that they deliver improvements that directly benefit integrated care; can easily be adopted by other NHS organisations as part of the NHS interoperability toolkit, as well as providing value for money. All must be completed by the end of March 2013 and trusts will be paid in installments as they hit milestones along the way.
More than half of NHS trusts rationing treatments: The National Audit Office (NAO) has revealed that more than half of NHS trusts have admitted they are rationing treatment to patients, The Telegraph reports, as it called for national guidelines to guarantee hip, knee and cataract operations across the country. Some 56% of primary care trust clusters told the NAO they had either introduced or tightened criteria determining which patients are eligible for at least one type of common operation. Hospitals in certain areas have stopped offering elective treatments for smokers or people above a certain level of obesity, while in others cataract patients are being forced to wait until their eyesight deteriorates further before being allowed surgery.
NHS trusts failing to protect patient data despite landmark fine: Building Better Healthcare has revealed that despite Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust being fined £260,000 following the discovery of highly-sensitive patient data on hard drives sold on an internet auction site, NHS trusts in the UK are still failing to properly audit commercial suppliers, putting them at risk of similar sanctions. Research by Aston Information Security reveals that just 14% of acute trusts have properly audited commercial third party suppliers, a failing that could leave them open to massive fines under the Data Protection Act. The study comes in the same week that Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust paid out the £260,000 fine to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the highest fine since the ICO was granted the power to issue civil monetary penalties in April 2010.
Stalis launches new web-based solution: Patients’ current and historical records, sourced across multiple clinical IT systems, can now be accessed via a new web-based solution called CareInform, reported Hospital Healthcare.com. Developed by Stalis, a provider of ‘end to end’ data and resource management solutions, it offers users across all health and social care settings a complete long term view of a patient’s health conditions and treatments based on a single integrated repository. As pressure to transform NHS patient services continues, Stalis says CareInform is ideally placed to help local health organisations achieve the Department of Health’s Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention targets.
TPP wins £28m Southern contract: TPP has been awarded a long-awaited contract to provide a centrally funded IT system to nine community and child health organisations in the South, reported eHealth Insider. A tender worth £28m was issued in August to provide a system for community providers previously covered by the Additional Supply Capability and Capacity programme (ASCC). ASCC was meant to provide community and child health systems, infrastructure and systems for acute trusts, and IT for ambulance trusts that otherwise got nothing from the National Programme for IT in the NHS. Among the nine organisations in line to get TPP are Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust and NHS Gloucestershire and Sussex Community NHS Trust.
Health and Wellbeing Boards should lead integrated care drive: A new report by think- tank the Smith Institute and accountancy body ACCA has revealed that Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs) could take the lead on integrating care in their areas, offer a more democratic approach to healthcare and help develop a shared plan for their local populations, reported National Health Executive. HWBs could deliver greater integration and minimise the duplication of services by working with local government and housing associations, but three separate funding streams could prove a challenge. The report calls for HWBs to evolve quickly and build broadly-based partnerships before becoming fully operational in April 2013.
Hunt: I’m open to NHS or private sector solutions: In his first major in-depth interview Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has told HSJ (subscription required) it is “not my job to hold a candle” for either NHS or private sector providers when deciding what is best for patients. However, as part of his interview on the government’s health policies, he claimed the listed company Circle’s management of Hinchingbrooke Health Care Trust had shown the independent sector was “able to provide the levels of clinical treatment and care” equal to that of the NHS. Hunt said: “I’m looking at the NHS as a whole, recognising that this is a system with a lot of pressures. I’m making sure I understand where the pressures are and that the system is responding in the way that it needs to deal with those pressures. I think the public would want to know they have a secretary of state who is completely on top of all the pressures in the system and knows what’s happening.”
NHS trust selects Wave Systems’ Safend Encryptor to replace ‘unreliable’ McAfee Endpoint: Bolton NHS Foundation Trust has selected security management firm Wave Systems’ Safend Encryptor to encrypt sensitive data and manage and recover data securely, reported Computing.co.uk. The trust said it was one of the first to implement a mandate from the Department of Health that all mobile data must be encrypted, and it followed this process and met the required standard for data encryption of mobile devices, as well as all laptop hard drives and USB storage devices.
Brighton A&E Twitter feed ‘to educate public’: Staff in a Brighton A&E unit tweeted about events in the hospital emergency department as they happened this week, reported the BBC. The two-day “tweet-a-thon” at the Royal Sussex County Hospital was to educate people about unnecessary A&E visits. A hospital spokesman told the BBC that the Twitter feed reported real emergencies and also non-emergencies. Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the A&E, said the number of people attending unnecessarily had risen significantly in recent years. The trust said A&E should only be used for serious injuries or critical situations.
David Haslam confirmed as chair of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence: David Haslam has been confirmed as chair of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), announced the Department of Health (DH). Professor David Haslam is currently the national clinical adviser to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), chair of the NICE Evidence Accreditation Advisory Board and an expert member of the NHS National Quality Board. Haslam will head up NICE, currently a Special Health Authority, which will become an Executive Non-Departmental Public Body from 1st April 2013 when it extends its remit to adults’ and children’s social care. The DH also announced this week that following Parliamentary endorsement, David Prior, currently chairman of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals Foundation Trust, has been confirmed as the new chair of the CQC.
Opinion
Joe’s view of Christmas past, present and future
As the wind down for Christmas begins, make sure you take time out this weekend to read Joe McDonald’s (NHS consultant psychiatrist and former national clinical lead for IT at CfH) laugh out loud piece in eHealth Insider. While healthcare technology is not always the most comical subject, Joe takes us back to yesteryear when he was in stitches after seeing his friend ‘Paddy’s’ first ever mobile phone and a table with a video game built in. McDonald explains how he was made to eat his words as little did he know “that phone and videogame platform would combine, add a computer, a high definition television, and an infinitely huge juke box, and become a device small enough to hold in your hand.”
McDonald adds that since then he has been afraid to predict the future but has decided to give it a stab after a recent visit he embarked on to take a look at a GP IT system.
“While we were busy with the National Programme for IT in the NHS, the GPs have been grinding away at the usability glitches in their systems. The difference between secondary care systems and modern GP systems is staggering. It’s the same degree of difference as there was between Paddy’s massive mobile and my iPhone5.
“I’m sure that my GP colleagues have known this for years and that all we needed to do was ask them, but the fact is that if we really want an NHS electronic patient record system it should be grown from general practice, not the Department of Health or the NHS Commissioning Board.”
The Guardian asks: Do we need a telehealth tsar?
In the Guardian Healthcare Network, Gill Hancock questions whether technology will deliver the benefits of telehealth, despite pilots, which show promising results. She argues that a well thought through care pathway is paramount before technology is considered.
“Among the numerous challenges facing the NHS in England, caring for more than 15 million patients with chronic conditions is arguably the biggest and accounts for 70% of its budget. Telehealth can offer better long-term care at lower cost, but despite its attractions and ministerial backing, implementation remains patchy.”
In the article she also asks Simon Jones, NHS Director of patient choice in England what his views on the matter are:
“I think the problem is that what we have often done is apply technology to poorly thought out care pathways and I would argue that NHS managers need to examine the points where interventions are delivered on a care pathway and whether these could be delivered effectively using telehealth.
“3millionlives, the Department of Health’s five-year programme to develop telehealth and remove barriers to take up, has no government funding and relies on industry to create funding mechanisms. Straight away you have a conflict: technology companies who make their money by selling telehealth and a healthcare delivery process that has to be clinically driven.
“I acknowledge that telehealth is suffering from a lack of national leadership. We have got a cancer tsar, a children’s tsar – we have got an everything else tsar – but does the heart tsar know about telehealth?”
Are clinical commissioning groups ready to go?
With less than four months before Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) take over from primary care trusts, just eight out of 211 have now been fully authorised. Richard Vize, from Guardian Professional, discusses why the focus will be on failings unless the system improves.
“The authorisation of the first clinical commissioning groups provides a window onto the state of readiness of the new NHS structures. With less than four months to go before the CCGs formally take over from primary care trusts, just eight out of the 211 have now been fully authorised by the NHS commissioning board to begin their work. After a gruelling five-month assessment against no fewer than 119 criteria, a further 26 of the ‘first wave’ CCGs have been authorised with ‘conditions’.
“In a phrase redolent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, these deviants from the true path have been told to establish a ‘rectification plan’. Some of the conditions amount to little more than adhering to a piece of guidance, but the problems in nine of the CCGs are serious enough for the board to insist on signing off remedial work.
“The new commissioning support units will be crucial in supporting CCGs in analysing population needs and developing strategies to meet them. It is the GP organisations that are supposed to be in the lead, but watch out for some of the weaker CCGs ending up being led by their support units.
“It will be fascinating to see which GP-led organisations emerge as the new system leaders and how they make a difference. Let’s hope they emerge quickly.”
Highland Marketing Blog
This week Sarah Bruce asks why there is not more funding and hard evidence readily available to demonstrates the benefits of healthcare IT to patient care and patient safety.
