Healthcare
Roundup
 
16 September 2022
 
Contact Us Twitter LinkedIn Send to colleague
Seven days in the NHS and health IT
NHS
Waiting list at new record high as mourning disrupts NHS services 
Mourning for Queen Elizabeth II continued all week. Her funeral will be on Monday, which has been designated as a bank holiday. NHS trusts seem to have made different decisions about maintaining or cancelling services that day (Morning Star). But mainstream and social media indicated that thousands of appointments have been cancelled (OpenDemocracy) (The Independent). The NHS waiting list reached another record high last week. Some 6.8 million people were waiting at the end of July – almost one in eight of the population. Of these people, more than 2.6 million had been waiting more than 18 weeks and 378,00 had been waiting more than a year (The Guardian).
Budget
Fiscal event could trigger NHS emergency plan next week
Nigel Edwards, the chief executive of the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said record long waits (above) at the start of the winter show new prime minister, Liz Truss, and her deputy, Therese Coffey, “inherit an NHS in a critical condition.” Truss is expected to sanction an emergency Budget or ‘fiscal event’ between the queen’s funeral and the party conference recess (Reuters), and this could trigger an ‘emergency plan’ for the NHS. The Guardian reported a plan could include the resumption of the ‘discharge to assess’ scheme that ran during Covid-19 and care homes paid to take patients fit for discharge from an acute bed.   
Public health 
Small state administration takes aim at anti-obesity strategy
Meanwhile, there have been indications this week that Liz Truss is planning to use her time in 10 Downing Street to lead a tax-cutting, deregulating government, with more leeway for finance and businesses, but fewer protections for consumers and citizens. One example is the widely reported review of the anti-obesity strategy for England which is due to see a ban on multi-buy deals and pre-watershed junk-food advertising introduced in October (BBC News). Public health experts said abandoning efforts to tackle obesity would be “a national scandal” when it contributes to around 64,000 deaths per year (The Guardian).
Health IT
Advanced still impacted by ransomware attack  
NHS software provider Advanced is still being affected by the ransomware attack that took down its key systems in mid-August (The Guardian report from 11 August). Specialist websites are speculating on why it is taking the company so long to restore the applications and asking whether backups were targeted or not being made regularly (The Stack). Neither NHS England nor the company have made any significant comment on the outage, which affected the Adastra system used by NHS 111 and the Carenotes system used by mental health trusts, among others. The Information Commissioner’s Office is also reported to be investigating.
Health IT
Health IT news: North West London works with InterSystems; Liverpool University Hospitals works with Softcat; NHS Digital makes social care funding awards 
North West London’s integrated care system has announced a five-year partnership with InterSystems, digitalhealth.net has reported. The company will use its HealthShare Health Connect Cloud service to support electronic data flows between health and social care. NHS Digital’s Digital Social Care programme has made six funding awards to care home and council projects that aim to improve the health and independence of older residents, the Health Tech Newspaper has reported. Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has announced a £4 million deal with Softcat, digitalhealth.net has reported. Softcat has become the trust’s device parter, as it prepares to open the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.
Health tech
Drones take off in the NHS
NHS Scotland is working with AGS Airports on a project to create a network of medical drones, PublicTechnology.net has reported. The Caelus (care and equity – healthcare logistics UAS Scotland) project secured initial funding in January 2020 to develop a ‘digital twin’ of the proposed network to transport medicines, bloods and other samples. It has now secured a further £10.1 million of funding from the Future Flight Challenge to progress the ‘once for Scotland’ concept. Drones are also being used to fly chemotherapy drugs from the pharmacy at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust to the Isle of Wight (trust website) and to ferry medical samples across Morecambe Bay (HTN).
Is health tech boring? Not with the right communications…
Highland Marketing Blog
Highland Marketing co-founders Mark and Susan Venables have been working with health tech for a long time. Recently, they’ve seen signs that there’s a growing perception that this is a sector with limited appeal; something the right communications approaches can help to dispel.  
Copyright © 2022 Highland Marketing Ltd. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email due to subscribing to our update list.
View our disclaimer and copyrights, and privacy policy.

Our mailing address is:
Highland Marketing Ltd
20 St Dunstan's Hill
London, EC3R 8HL
United Kingdom

Add us to your address book

Unsubscribe from this list