NHS England sets out how trusts should treat patients who are dying following the announcement that the Liverpool Care Pathway is to be scrapped.
4.12pm NHS England has issued guidance on end of life care. It follows the announcement earlier this week that the Liverpool Care Pathway was to be scrapped and replaced with individual end of life care plans.
The guidance says: “The principles of good palliative care, on which it is based, must continue to be upheld: regular assessment and management of symptom control and comfort measures, effective communication with patients and their families, and provision of psychological, social and spiritual support. These principles hold true, whether or not the LCP or any integrated care pathway or plan for the dying is used.”
The guidance sets out what trusts should do to ensure the best possible care of people at the end of their lives.
3.39pm A damning Care Quality Commission report could cause Frimley Park to walk away from its planned takeover of Heatherwood and Wexham Park Foundation Trust.
In an interview with HSJ’s south central reporter David Williams, Heatherwood chief executive Philippa Slinger said concerns over the quality of care at her trust were a potential “walk away point” for Frimley Park.
She also acknowledged that the poor care, which pointed to cultural problems at the trust, happened on her watch, and could threaten her position if it caused local commissioners or Monitor to lose confidence in her.
2.42pm The NHS Litigation Authority has reported that the year on year increase in clinical negligence claims against NHS trusts is continuing.
The organisation reports a 10.8 per cent rise in the number of new claims reported in the year ending March 2013, and a 66 per cent increase over the past four years.
The NHS Litigation Authority estimates that a “staggering” £23bn will be needed to cover known claims and future claims arising from events which have already happened but have not yet been reported.
Dr Stephanie Bown, Director of Policy and Communications, at the Medical Protection Society said: “We are disturbed to see that the percentage of claimants’ legal’ costs continues to increase and now reportedly stands at over 44 per cent of the cost of compensation to patients. Whilst we strongly believe that patients should receive fair compensation, we also believe that too often claimant legal costs are disproportionately high. We have experience of claimant lawyers billing three times the level of compensation.
“Whereas claimant costs are often higher than those of defendants, it seems desperately unfair that in just five years claimant costs have increased from 2.6 times that of the defendants to more than 4.1 times. As a demonstration of the need for the legal costs reforms this could not be clearer.
“We sincerely hope that changes brought in by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act in April 2013 will start to have an impact in the months and years ahead.”
1.32pm Macmillan Cancer Support chief executive and NHS England non executive director Ciaran Devane has apparently been bumped from a television news schedule because of the weather.
He tweets: “TV interview just cancelled because of ‘weather story’. At least it is ‘warm & sunny’. Bounced for ‘light rain’ would have been sad.”
1.25pm Some reaction to the appointment, announced today, of Andrea Sutcliffe as chief inspector of adult social care.
Mike Farrar, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “This is a great appointment for the CQC and highlights the regulator’s determination to get itself back on a strong footing. Andrea has an impressive track record in the public sector and is well respected both in the social care and health fields.
“I have no doubt that she will be fully committed to this role, and use her experience to help root out practices of poor care and improve services for social care users, their carers and the staff providing services.
“The NHS Confederation looks forward to working with Andrea over the coming months in her new role.”
1.19pm New on HSJ today: Barts Heath Trust is “in turnaround”, but not in adminstration, it has been revealed.
The decision came after it emerged that the trust has been losing £2m a week.
Barts Health Trust in London has revealed it is bringing in management consultants to address the financial problems.
In May the trust had a £15.7m deficit on the financial year beginning April - a loss of almost £2m a week over those two months - according to board papers published earlier this month.
Officials said that the deficit was “significantly worse” than projected.
11.44am Duncan Selbie, the chief executive of Public Health England, has expressed disappointment over the government’s decision not to bring in either standardised cigarette packaging or a minimum unit price for alcohol.
His “Friday message”, published today, says: “We share and understand the disappointment across the public health family that neither standardised packaging nor minimum unit pricing are to be taken forward for the moment by government.
“With tobacco and alcohol being among the nation’s top killers this is, however, hopefully a case of not now, rather than never. Both the Prime Minister and the secretary of state have made clear that they are open to further evidence emerging.
“Lest we forget, nine out of ten smokers begin as children and helping them make better choices is a child protection concern. Likewise, the evidence tells us that doing all we can to reduce the ready availability of cheap, higher strength alcohol helps the youngest and the heaviest drinkers most.
“We must never sacrifice what we can get for what we want as public health professionals and what we want often takes time. Think of smoking in public places and seat belt legislation. For example, we will exploit to the full the measure announced by the Home Office on Wednesday to create local alcohol action areas, in partnership with local government and the local NHS.”
James Illman reports: “The troubled health information service, which is losing £1.5m a month, has recently endured a torrid period in which it has been forced to exit two of its contracts to run the 111 urgent care telephone service.
The one-year contract with its counterpart Heathdirect Australia is worth a “six figure sum”.
11.02am Here’s the NHS Blood and Transplant response to today’s coverage of the sale of Plasma Resources UK Ltd.
“Blood donors may be… under the impression that NHS Blood and Transplant sells blood collected by volunteer donors for a profit. This is not the case”, it says.
“PRUK is a separate business, owned by the government, and is not part of NHS Blood and Transplant. Neither the blood from our donors, nor the resulting blood components, are supplied to PRUK.”
There’s also this story on HSJ this morning.
10.55am Here’s a story from yesterday that’s worth a look if you haven’t read it yet: NHS England’s chief financial officer has said it would be a “heroic undertaking” for the NHS to save enough money to pay for the government’s £3.8bn pooled fund for integrated health and social care.
Setting up the fund in 2015-16, as announced in last month’s spending round, would require savings of 6 or 7 per cent, Paul Baumann told NHS England’s board.
10.49am Some patients at Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust are continuing to suffer poor care more than four years after widespread failures at the trust first emerged, Shaun Lintern reports.
A patient experience survey by a local health watchdog has received complaints about patients being left to lie in their own urine, failure to administer pain relief, rude staff and medical misdiagnoses.
Engaging Communities Staffordshire, an independent social enterprise established in the wake of the scandal at Mid Staffordshire, received 142 responses from the public covering the years between 1997 and 2013.
A total of 25 per cent said they had an overall negative experience, while 69 per cent said their time as a patient was positive.
10.44am The Financial Times and the Independent both report this morning on the government’s deal to sell Plasma Resources UK - a publicly owned plasma products supplier – to private equity firm Bain Capital.
The FT leads its story on the news that Bain will pay £200m to take control of the company, in which the Department of Health will retain a 20 per cent stake.
The Independent takes a slightly different angle, reporting that the government “was tonight accused of gambling with the UK’s blood supply” by selling the state-owned firm to the US company “co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney”.
10.43am The Independent has run a story based on GP Magazine’s investigation into delays in dementia diagnosis.
More than a third of patients had to wait more than the recommended six weeks to access memory tests, while some patients in Wiltershire faced delays of up to a year.
10.11am Also new today: The Care Quality Commission has appointed its chief inspector of social care, reports Sarah Calkin.
To find out who it is, click here.
10.09am New on HSJ this morning: Monitor has given Heatherwood and Wexham Park Foundation Trust three months to improve following a damning Care Quality Commission report.
The move follows the Care Quality Commission on Wednesday issuing the trust with a warning notice for its failures to comply with both quality and management standards and to raise concerns about issues including staffing levels and patient dignity problems.
Heatherwood and Wexham Park has been in special measures for the last four years for its failure to meet emergency department waiting targets and its financial problems.
8.38am: Good morning, continuing our Inspirational Women’s week, Dr Ruth Sealy at Cranfield University talks to HSJ today about women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies and what the healthcare sector could learn from them on female leadership.
In the audio podcast she says childcare is not the simple answer as why there aren’t as many female leaders at board level but rather to do with leadership culture in healthcare.
There is also a profile on Suzanne Rastrick, director of quality at Dorset CCG. “Coaching and mentoring schemes are a great way to develop leadership skills”, she says.
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