Urgent and emergency care recovery plan issued The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have issued an urgent and emergency care recovery plan for the health service in England. The plan repeats many of the ideas and targets in this year’s operational planning and contracting guidance and winter preparations advice, but gained traction in the media by saying it is now a government ‘ambition’ for virtual wards to treat 50,000 patients per month (BBC News, digitalhealth.net). The Health Service Journal noted that 4,000 temporary hospital beds will also be made permanent – although readers asked where they would go and who would staff them.

NHS 111 to expand as part of new ‘offer’ for families and children  The urgent and emergency care recovery plan (above) also includes a blueprint to develop NHS 111. The plan says parents and carers looking for health advice for children and young people on the NHS 111 online website or from the NHS 111 helpline will get “increased access to specialist advice” from paediatric clinicians. There will also be direct access to mental health support. The recruitment of more clinicians takes NHS 111 back towards the model used by NHS Direct. NHS 111 is also being integrated into the NHS App, as part of the government’s bid to drive usage by making it a ‘digital front door’ for the health service.

NHS strikes and pay latest   The British Medical Association has opened an indicative ballot to see whether consultants are inclined to take action on pay and conditions (ITV news). Nurses and ambulance workers will be holding another wave of strikes next week (The Mirror). The Commons’ health and social care committee has established that the Department of Health and Social care has missed the deadline for submitting evidence to the NHS Pay Review Body for 2023-4 (Daily Mail). NHS England’s evidence is a gloomy assessment of the state of staff recruitment, retention and morale, set against warnings about the ‘trade offs’ that will result from an unfunded settlement big enough to address the issues.

Time up for NHS Digital  NHS Digital has ceased to exist. The NHS has periodically set up agencies to run combinations of IT strategy, national systems, and data; only to shut them down again. But the Health and Social Care Information Centre, as NHS Digital was known officially, lasted a decade from 2013. It was officially merged into the NHS England transformation directorate at midnight on 31 January. Digitalhealth.net editor Jon Hoeksma marked its departure with a review of its successes; but noted that many of its projects and staff face an uncertain future, as NHS England looks to shed up to 40% of its workforce.

Norfolk trusts prepare to launch EPR tender Three trusts in Norfolk are preparing to launch a keenly awaited tender for an electronic patient record programme. Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals, Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn, and James Paget University Hospitals NHS foundation trusts have confirmed they are looking for an EPR. The Health Service Journal reported that NHS England signed off on the outline business case for a contract valued at around £155 million on Friday. The three hospitals have been planning a joint project for years, and have had a number of false starts with different companies. The latest plan falls under the remit of the Frontline Digitisation programme.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ publishes report on summer IT outage Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has published a report into the failure of both of its data centres during the heatwave that hit London on 19 July. The failure took out 371 systems, forced the trust to declare a critical incident, took six-weeks to recover, and led to £1.4 million of unexpected IT costs. Computer Weekly reported the trust was warned about cooling issues in 2018, but these were not fully acted on. Open Democracy reported a broken hose connector and difficulties in finding a tap meant staff couldn’t manually hose down the cooling system on the day.   The Register reported that the number and complexity of the trust’s legacy systems added to the time it took to recover. A third party was brought in to sort out conflicts between backups; and had to manually extract data and copy files between them. Guy’s and St Thomas’ is due to roll out the EPIC electronic patient record system in April this year. The report said this will pave the way for a rationalisation and consolidation of legacy IT systems. But the outage shows the urgent necessity for the NHS to sort out legacy infrastructure and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Health IT news: from Better, Inhealthcare, and digital clinical audit specialists CaseCapture The Christie NHS Foundation Trust has selected Better to implement an e-prescribing and medicines administration solution that supports its openEHR strategy for EPR, Digitalhealth.net reported. A partnership of health and care organisations in Humber and North Yorkshire is working with Inhealthcare on a data-sharing project to alert community providers when their patients are admitted to hospital (digitalhealth.net). Mark Pridmore, head of strategy at CaseCapture, has argued that under-pressure trusts could save time and understand their performance better if they adopted a digital approach to clinical audit. In an article for Health Tech World, he argued effective audit systems could also help trusts to capture CQUIN data.