Welcome to our Easter edition of the Highland Marketing Healthcare Roundup. We have supplemented our slightly shortened edition this week with an Easter quiz which includes a mixture of general knowledge questions about Easter. To get you into the Easter spirit and to entice the chocolate taste buds, the winning entry will receive a chocolate bunny indulgence Easter hamper. Enter the competition now!
News in brief
NHS financial crisis “looming”, King’s Fund warns: The NHS faces “significant cuts to services” unless extra cash is ploughed in by the next government, according to a health charity’s poll of finance chiefs. Health Service Journal (subscription required) reports that The King’s Fund said the next government will need to find more funds for the health service or accept cuts. The warning comes after its latest report on NHS finances painted a bleak picture for the future. A poll of 74 NHS trust finance directors and 47 clinical commissioning group finance leads found that only two in five hospital financial bosses are confident their organisation will achieve financial balance in 2014-2015. Just 16 per cent believe this will be achieved in 2015-2016. Meanwhile, only one in three finance leads for clinical commissioning groups are sure they will balance the books in 2015-2016, according to the healthcare charity’s latest report. The report warns of a “looming” financial crisis in the NHS. It claims that lack of confidence about future finances is partly down to concerns about the Better Care Fund – which will draw £1.9bn of funds from the NHS to support joined up working between health and social care services from April 2015. A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “As this report acknowledges, the NHS is performing well and meeting demand, despite increasing pressures on services. We recognise the scale of the financial challenge that trusts are facing and are taking action to address deficits, including putting recovery plans in place.”
GP opening hours scheme ‘to benefit seven million patients’: New opening hours for some GP surgeries in England will benefit more than seven million patients, far more than originally planned, David Cameron has said. The BBC reports that the prime minister announced the £50m GP Access Fund in October – and he now says a “great response” from surgeries means 1,147 will take part. Cameron says surgeries will offer access to GPs outside normal hours and by methods including phone, email and Skype. The GP Access Fund is intended to make it possible for people to see their GP in evenings or weekends, or contact them remotely for convenience. A Department of Health spokesman said it originally estimated half a million people would benefit from the £50m pot, but high levels of interest had meant more surgeries were included. Cameron said: “There has been a great response from doctors, with lots of innovative ideas, and we will now see over seven million patients given weekend and evening opening hours, alongside more access to their family doctor on the phone, via email or even Skype. This is an important step and good news for patients.” Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the British Medical Association’s General Practice Committee, said the changes must be “properly supported”. “The government must take further action so that community, social and urgent care work in tandem to deliver truly holistic care to patients,” he said.
Staffordshire to invest £13m on EPR: According to eHealth Insider, Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust has been given the green light to invest £13m on an electronic patient record (EPR) project. The trust announced this week that it has been given approval from the NHS Trust Development Authority to procure and develop a “state of art” system to improve the recording and access of patient information. Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent is a joint community and social care trust and serves a population of 1.1 million people. Jonathan Tringham, the trust’s director of finance and resources, said it needed a new system quickly and it plans to go out to procurement shortly. It expects to go-live in summer 2015. “When the trust was established it inherited more than 30 different clinical IT systems. These meet the needs of individual services but are disconnected from any central record and result in an incomplete picture of the patient,” he said. “A large proportion of our clinical records are also manual or paper. Records of this kind can only be used in one place and time and restricts joined up working both within the partnership and externally with our partners, often delaying some aspects of care.” It plans to deploy an EPR, scanning facility and eventually a patient portal. The trust has made significant investments in IT recently, including £5m to buy computer equipment to support community staff. This includes £1m in funding from the Nursing Technology Fund, which will be spent on rolling out laptops, clinical tablets and smartphones.
Staff participation key to delivering NHS IT strategy: Frontline clinician and patient participation are key to the successful development of the NHS’s future technology strategy, according to Beverley Bryant, NHS England’s director of strategic systems and technology. According to National Health Executive, Bryant told delegates at Westminster Health Forum that NHS England has delayed the publication of its 10 year technology strategy while it draws in ‘partners’ from across the care system and collects evidence about what works. NHS England needs evidence to persuade the Treasury that investing in technology for the NHS not only delivers better patient experience and safety, but also efficiency and value for money, she said. “I need case studies and an evidence base that says if you spend money implementing technology in your organisation, these are the benefits you can expect. Ongoing staff and patient participation, as we develop these things, is the mantra that we are pushing out as far as we can.” Bryant added that feedback from forums, held as part of the £500m Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards Technology Fund to digitise the NHS, has indicated the inefficiencies of paper-based systems. Earlier this month, NHS England outlined plans for how more than £230m in funding will be used to ensure all GP practices across England have high-quality IT systems, while also helping continue the move from paper to digital record-keeping. Additionally last month the first round of investment from the £100m Nursing Technology Fund was announced by Bryant.
NHS 24 delays £27m IT system: NHS 24 has delayed the deployment of its £27m patient contact and triage management system indefinitely, just weeks before going live with NHS 111, reports eHealth Insider. The patient call management system, supplied by Capgemini, was due to be deployed last autumn in order to provide a better call handling and triaging service for Scotland’s national health and self-care advice service. However, it has been delayed after various issues were identified during tests. The delay comes as the Scottish version of NHS 111, the non-emergency alternative to 999, is due to go live at the end of April. NHS 24 chief executive, John Turner, said that the delay would not impact on the service provided by the health advice line. “In recent years, NHS 24 has been developing a programme to update our technology systems for the future. Our intention is to continue to develop the system with our suppliers and to deploy it when it is safe to do so. In the meantime, the current systems continue to work effectively in supporting the delivery of our services across Scotland, and people should not hesitate to contact the NHS 24 service if they need to,” said Turner. The news of the delay comes soon before Scotland is due to switch over from its 0845 number to NHS 111, the deployment of which in England has faced significant problems since its launch in Easter 2013 and contributed to the closure of NHS Direct. A spokeswoman from the Scottish Government said that the IT system delay would have no impact on the NHS 111 launch.
Colchester gets cancer IT: Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust is implementing a new IT system as part of its response to the problems with cancer pathways that led to it being put into ‘special measures’ last year, according to eHealth Insider. An update to the trust’s board of directors, says the trust has now installed the Somerset system for collecting cancer waiting times and tracking the progress of treatment. A report on an ‘immediate review’ of cancer services at the trust, ordered by NHS England after staff complained to the Care Quality Commission that waiting times were being falsified, found that the trust had bought the Somerset Cancer Information System in 2010. However, the December report said it had never been implemented, leaving the trust using multiple, separate systems including paper that required staff to enter information multiple times and left them unable to access real-time data. The improvement plan update says Somerset has now been implemented and data migration is complete. The trust has also created a contact centre for suspected cancer referrals from GPs, and was due to handle two week waits through Choose and Book from last month. Kim Hodgson, the trust’s new chief executive, told the board that the trust was “on the road to recovery.” It will remain in special measures until Monitor is satisfied. Colchester has a bigger IT programme to replace its legacy McKesson patient administration system, Totalcare, and to “move its systems forward 50 years” by implementing a portal.
Innovation network could slip into ‘self-defeating spiral’: The much-vaunted scheme to drive and spread healthcare innovation across the country risks slipping into a “self-defeating spiral”, senior figures have warned after NHS England slashed its budget. Health Service Journal (subscription required) reports that warnings about the impact of budget cuts on the 15 academic health science networks (AHSNs) come from several of their senior members. The networks, launched amid much fanfare by NHS England last May, are expected to bring together NHS, private sector and academic organisations. And the budget cut is revealed in NHS England’s 2014-2015 business plan, which shows that AHSNs will receive £53.6m this financial year. NHS England insists this is just a 5 per cent cut on last year’s budget. However, it represents a larger 23 per cent cut on the £70m NHS England said last May that it had set aside for the programme in 2013-2014. One senior AHSN figure said NHS England risked “castrating” the programme by cutting the budget and by a perceived lack of promotion in the networks. “They are trying to save a comparatively small amount of money but in doing so they risk castrating the AHSNs,” they added. “Commissioners are not going to sign up to us if they are thinking that we are not going to be around in two years’ time.” NHS England said it was “committed to funding AHSNs throughout the period of their five-year licence” but said the amount of support will be decided on a year-by-year basis.
Royal College of Physicians elects new president: Professor Jane Dacre has been elected president of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), beating nine other candidates, reports National Health Executive. Professor Dacre, director of UCL Medical School and a consultant physician and rheumatologist at the Whittington Hospital in North London, is the third female president of the RCP. Until recently she was medical director of the MRCP (UK) – the membership examination of the Joint Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK. Previous posts include vice dean and director of medical education, UCL, between 2007 and 2010, and professor of medical education at UCL. She said: “I am honoured to have been elected as president of the Royal College of Physicians today. I look forward to the challenges ahead, and to helping physicians to have a stronger voice in the NHS.” She takes over from Sir Richard Thompson and is expected to serve for four years.
Opinion
The NHS: running out of money
It is looking rather predictable that the NHS is running out of money, Richard Murray, The King’s Fund’s director of policy, explained this week. He was commenting on their latest quarterly monitoring report (QMR) and the deteriorating financial position reported by Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority.
“From the QMR we are spoilt for choice over gloomy predictions: for example, more than 80 per cent of NHS trust finance directors are fairly or very pessimistic about the financial state of the wider health (and care) economy over the next year. For 2015/16, a breath-taking 98 per cent of NHS trust finance directors rated the chances of delivering the 15 per cent reduction in emergency admissions that NHS England estimates is needed as quite or very unlikely, with the `verys’ strongly predominant.
“The mood of pessimism is borne out by the latest news on actual financial performance. For foundation trusts, Monitor reported that for the year-to-date 39 organisations are in deficit and for trusts, the NHS Trust Development Authority reports that 26 organisations forecast an end-year deficit. For both foundation trusts and trusts these numbers are higher than planned.
“Back in 2010, if we had been told the NHS would make it to 2014 on broadly flat real funding and be delivering services that have at least maintained performance and in some cases improved it (excepting occasional glitches on A&E), I think we would have been pretty pleased. However, having reached 2014, instead of getting ready to spend the +3 per cent real-terms growth per annum that the NHS has historically been used to, we are facing an even greater affordability challenge and trying to meet it through yet more efficiencies. No wonder finance directors are worried. This is something we will return to in our new report, published on 1st May, providing a deep dive into productivity.”
How text messages can eradicate waiting times
An automated text messaging system can save time for staff and make access to appointments easier for patients, Tom Whicher, co-founder of DrDoctor explains in the Guardian this week.
“Has there ever been a more explosive issue in the NHS than waiting times?
“As one of the most high-profile targets in the NHS, managers are under pressure to throw resources at attempts to bring down breaches, such as employing extra staff to chase patients to ensure they attend, and often putting on extra clinics at a cost of around £600 a throw. Given that the average hospital runs around 200 extra clinics, this bill could end up at an extra £100,000 a year.
“It is against this backdrop that some hospitals are starting to recognise ways that simple everyday technology can help. DrDoctor has been working with a number of hospitals and clinical commissioning groups across the UK to introduce an automated text messaging system that saves time for staff and makes access to appointments easier for patients.
“We are forever being told that the NHS is lacking in innovation. Creative use of existing technologies and giving patients better information will go a long way to reduce the consistent problem of missed appointments, late cancellations, and the failure of some trusts to meet 18 week limits on waiting times. It won’t solve all problems, but it would be a well-needed start.”
Highland Marketing news
Highland Marketing extends its experienced healthcare team with the appointment of NHS business intelligence manager Simon Rollason as an industry advisor.
