More strikes to hit NHS in England  The NHS could be looking at months of strike action, following the lack of movement on the junior doctors’ dispute, and a split decision by nursing and other unions on whether to accept an improved pay deal. Members of UNISON accepted the government’s latest offer, but members of the Royal College of Nursing rejected it (The Guardian), while the leadership of Unite refused to recommend it. RCN members will walk out for 48 hours over the May bank holiday, and could be joined by junior doctors in a move that NHS Providers said would take the NHS into “unchartered territory” (Sky News).

NHS news: Labour says NHS is broken and plans GP reform; NHS App stalls  Labour leader Keir Starmer has said successive Conservative administrations have presided over a “cycle of decline” in the NHS that has left it “broken”. Speaking ahead of the local elections, he focused on a survey suggesting that one in five respondents who had attended A&E had done so because they couldn’t get a GP appointment (The Guardian). Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting was due to outline a plan to reform general practice on Friday. Meanwhile, the Health Service Journal reported that government plans to make the NHS App a ‘digital front door’ to the NHS seem to be stalling, with download rates falling and practices turning off appointment booking.

NHS England picks Spine platform developer  NHS England has awarded a contract to develop a new platform for the NHS Spine. UK Authority has reported that the four-year, £19 million contract has gone to Aire Logic, which will develop a more open platform that will enable Spine functions to run as separate microservices in the cloud. NHS England is running a Spine Futures programme to update the NHS data backbone and make it easier for new suppliers to integrate with it, using the messaging exchange for health and social care (MESH). Aire Logic is an employee-owned technology consultancy that works with NHS trusts and public bodies.

Scottish Government looks to grow innovation  The Scottish Government is looking to encourage innovation in healthcare technology. PublicTechnology.net has reported that the Techscaler programme – which is looking to set up seven hubs around the country to help start-ups grow their business – has formed a partnership with the NHS Test Bed programme – which was created to enable health service organisations to work with academic and industry partners on new ideas. The partnership will enable successful test bed teams to join the hubs programme, which is supported by a £42 million contract with Edinburgh-based tech incubator CodeBase.

Health IT news: about home testing, prehab, communications, and clinical audit  The Christie NHS Foundation Trust is trialling a device called Liberty that has been developed by health tech company Entia. It enables patients to take a blood sample, analyse it at home, and send the results to the hospital for review. Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust is running a Macmillan Cancer Support-funded pilot to offer digital ‘prehabilitation’ to head and neck cancer patients, to optimise their health ahead of treatment (round-up on Health Tech Newspaper). NHS Hertfordshire and West Essex has awarded a three-year contract to Kooth for a digital mental healthcare service for children and young people in its area (HTN).   Maternity services across Suffolk and North East Essex have been using the CardMedic healthcare communications app since last November, Health Tech World has reported. The app is being used to help expectant parents with communications difficulties to engage with their healthcare teams, in line with government policy to reduce health inequalities. Linking clinical audit studies with other data sets can provide valuable new insights, CaseCapture has argued. In a blog on HTW, system architect Martin Dean gives the examples of adding postcode or Index of Multiple Deprivation data to identify inequalities; or information about IT outages to get an understanding of their impact.