3.20pm: The Centre for Workforce Intelligence is predicting there could be a potential over supply of 11,000 to 19,000 pharmacists by 2040.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Health Education England (HEE) are consulting on the supply of pharmacy graduates in England following a request from the Government for both organisations to review the current arrangements for the study of pharmacy, and the publication of the report by the Centre for Workforce Intelligence on the future pharmacist workforce.
1.55pm: Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham, responded to the comments by FTN chief executive Chris Hopson saying: “Week by week, the monumental folly of David Cameron’s costly NHS re-organisation becomes clearer.
“He broke up a successful NHS just when it most needed stability. Now confusion reigns and we have an NHS at war with itself. In the midst of the biggest financial challenge in its history, no-one knows who’s in charge or who is responsible for what. It is political mismanagement on a grand scale.
“Ministers turned the NHS into the world’s biggest quango - against the advice of medics and patients - but failed to understand the implications of their actions.
“Nobody voted for this re-organisation, but Ministers pressed on regardless and siphoned £3 billion out of the NHS front-line to pay for it. They have given six-figure pay-offs to thousands of managers and, scandalously, P45s to thousands of nurses.
“By throwing the NHS into chaos, this Prime Minister has shown you simply can’t trust the Tories with the NHS.”
1.45pm: Chris Hopson, head of the Foundation Trust Network has told the BBC’s health correspondent Jane Dreaper that the Department of Health and NHS England are like “warring parents.”
Chris Hopson described it as a key central relationship in England’s newly restructured health service
Mr Hopson said: “There’s a joke that relationships start off by forming. Then they go through a storming stage, and once that’s finished they norm.
“There’s a definite sense at the moment that there’s quite a lot of storming going on. One would hope the relationship will develop and norm - because at the moment they’re finding their feet.
“Sometimes those of us in the NHS look up and think - this is warring parents who ought to get their act together so we can do what we need to do in the NHS.”
Sources close to the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, dismissed the remarks as “unsubstantiated opinion”.
1.30pm: The Health Foundation has opened applications for its Shine programme which invites healthcare teams to apply for up to £75,000 worth of funding for improvement projects.
Money will be available for “innovative trials to develop and test” ideas that could improve healthcare which support people to take a more active role in their own health and care, improving patient safety or improving quality while reducing costs.
If you think you have a project which can match these aims then please visit www.health.org.uk/shine and to look at previous successful innovative projects please visit www.health.org.uk/shine2012
1.05pm: Councils’ public health grants will be ringfenced for a third year, Public Health England has announced.
Duncan Selbie, chief executive of the national body, said on Friday that the grants would remain ringfenced until 2015-16. When the grants were first announced they came with a two-year ringfence, for 2013-14 and 2014-15.
The grants, worth £2.6bn this year, are from the Department of Health and can only be spent on improving the health of the local population.
1pm: HSJ Editor Alastair McLellan tweets: “Want to come to HSJ’s invite-only Commissioning Summit in Notts on Sep 19/20? If so, email me at alastair.mclellan@emap.com & make yr case.”
11.50am: The DH have not confirmed that an announcement will be made about winter pressures money on 10 September (see 11.35am) – they assure us they’re “working with stakeholders” on the project, and that the date will be made clear in due course.
11.35am: The Department of Health is expected to make an announcement about which areas are going to be allocated winter pressures funding on 10 September, HSJ has learned.
HSJ revealed last month that the department was going to spend £500m over two years on the areas whose emergency departments were experiencing the worst pressure.
We’ve been told this morning that there are currently 53 health economies whose bids for the funding are under consideration.
11.10am: The Daily Mail carries a page 16 lead story headlined: “NHS denies the elderly life-saving treatment for cancer”.
The paper said “Some patients over 75 are six times more likely to have operations to remove cancer than those living in other areas where doctors have written them off because of their dates of birth”.
The figures came from research by former Lib Dem health minister Paul Burstow and he told the paper “a postcode lottery” saw “life-saving surgery not being made available to older people” in some parts of the country.
11am: NHS England is to publish quarterly lists of all the “never events” – the worst preventable mistakes – recorded in the NHS, broken down by trust, HSJ can reveal.
The national commissioning body will produce its first online list recording the number and type of incidents at each trust this October.
NHS England revealed the move in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the number and type of clinical incidents.
It has collected the data from trusts since the start of 2013-14 financial year.
The Department of Health has defined 25 types of never event, including surgery on the wrong area, misplaced nasogastric tubes and “maladministration of insulin”.
10.30am: Six NHS commissioning support units are forming a “strategic alliance” with the aim of working jointly on major contracts and developing services.
The CSUs involved in the collaboration, which they have named the Elis group, are North and East London, North of England, South West, Staffordshire and Lancashire, Cheshire and Merseyside, and South.
The group said its membership was mainly based on existing relationships, like-minded leadership, and an aim of having a national spread, with few CSUs which are in direct competition.
10.20am: There’s lots of health news in the Daily Telegraph this morning.
On page six there’s a prominent story based on a survey by Campden Health, which found that one in eight GP practices admits that they allow receptionists to decide which patients need urgent treatment.
Accompanying that is another story, about age discrimination in the NHS. Treatment statistics obtained by the former health minister Paul Burstow show dramatic variations in the availability of surgery for people aged over 75 across England.
The data appears to be based on old primary care trust areas, suggesting it is several years old.
For example, there were 1,331 hip replacements carried out the “North East Oxfordshire” PCT area per 100,000 population, compared with just 275 in Brent.
Brent also had the lowest rate of knee replacement operations, with Dacorum PCT, in Hertfordshire, having the highest.
And, the Telegraph also has a story about a free shingles vaccine being offered to everyone in their seventies.
10.14am: Medtronic, a US medical devices group, has diversified into NHS healthcare delivery, winning contracts to take over the management of cardiology services at two large trusts, the Financial Times reports this morning.
It states: “University Hospital of South Manchester [Foundation] Trust and Imperial College Healthcare Trust have signed long-term partnerships handing Medtronic management of their catheterisation laboratories, responsible for producing diagnostic images of the heart and arteries.”
The paper suggests that this “approach risks triggering a debate over potential conflicts of interest, given that the partnerships include a guarantee for a proportion of the equipment acquired to be bought from Medtronic rather than rival suppliers of imaging devices”.
However, South Manchester chairman Felicity Goody told the paper that “our clinicians must have final say on the devices they use”.
10.10am: Finance managers are calling for a reform of the NHS internal payments system.
The Healthcare Financial Management Association wants to see the system move towards paying by outcomes instead of activity.
In a joint study with the King’s Fund, the HFMA said a new method of internal payments should be introduced. This would be based on full coverage of payments between commissioners and healthcare providers and help the NHS build on innovations such as best practice tariffs.
9.45am: The UK is the “addiction capital of Europe”, with some of its highest rates of opiate addiction and dependence on alcohol, a report has warned.
Alcohol and drug abuse cost the UK £21bn and £15bn respectively, and the crisis of increasing addiction is fuelling the breakdown of society, according to the think-tank The Centre for Social Justice.
The CSJ says the UK has become a hub for websites peddling “legal highs” or “club drugs” such as Salvia or Green Rolex, which are ordered online and distributed around the country by postmen and couriers who unwittingly become drugs mules.
9.30am: The Guardian reports on claims by union body TUC that agency workers are being paid up to £135 a week less than permanent staff for doing the same job, despite EU rules saying they are entitled to equal pay. The body is to launch a formal complaint today against the government for failing to enforce European rules meant to guarantee equal treatment for temporary staff.
8.55am: Good morning, last year alone, 24 per cent of staff reported being bullied. Meanwhile, many senior managers fear the consequences of raising concerns as much as their staff, if not more so writes Roger Kline on HSJ’s innovation and efficiency channel today.
The principles of openness, transparency and candour espoused by Robert Francis will not primarily come about through increased regulation. They will emerge when leaders, managers and staff fundamentally change their organisation’s culture, placing patients at the heart of decisions, not the needs of the organisation or its leaders.
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