Philippa Slinger resigns as chief executive of Heatherwood and Wexham Park Foundation Trust.
6.00pm Health and social care organisations today launched a joint sustainability development strategy.
Organisations involved include NHS England, Public Health England and the Local Government Association.
Outgoing NHS England chair Sir David Nicholson said: “We are extremely pleased that for the first time the health and care system is pulling together to address our major sustainability challenges such as climate change, pollution and adverse weather events.
“This is an issue close to my heart and we have come a long way since I launched the NHS Carbon Reduction Strategy in 2009.
“Excellent work is already being done across the country which shows sustainability is effective and can impact directly on clinical care and we want to harness their innovation and build on it.”
Duncan Selbie, chief executive of Public Health England, said: “We are delighted to be an integral part of this health and care system-wide approach to sustainable development.
“PHE will play a particular role in collecting, synthesising and sharing information about the health impacts of environmental and social change and the most effective actions that can be taken to address these.
“It is only through working in partnership within and across our organisations, and with our communities, that we will unleash the innovation and practical “can do” needed to genuinely improve health and wellbeing.”
5.17pm The Social Care Institute for Excellence has commented on the rise in admissions of elderly people to A&E departments.
Chief executive Tony Hunter said:
“These figures show a worrying increase in older people’s admission to A and E; it’s an urgent issue for policy-makers and care staff. It’s easy for people to respond to the report by laying the fault, separately at the door of GPs, social care staff and other services in the community. Our evidence shows that more effective joint working between community-based health and care services can reduce all types of unnecessary hospital admissions, not just those to A and E.”
The trust announced Philippa Slinger’s departure this afternoon, and said that her new employer would be announced on Friday.
Heatherwood and Wexham Park received a critical report by the Care Quality Commission last summer and is set to be taken over by Frimley Park Foundation Trust in July.
4.03pm A business park in Oxfordshire has received money to grow a life sciences centre.
Milton Park has been awarded a share of a £100 million government cash injection to accelerate growth and jobs in enterprise zones across the UK.
It will receive a grant of up to £7 million to support the development of a £14 million, 40,000 sq ft specialist science centre for small and growing businesses within the life sciences sector.
3.11pm Describing obesity as a disease may be counter productive, the Daily Mail reports.
Research by the University of Minnesota found evidence that “medicalising” obesity may lead some people to think they have no control over their weight, reducing the likelihood that they will cut their calorie intake.
2.48pm In The Independent, a report by the King’s Fund has revealed that one in five NHS hospitals now expects to be in deficit by the end of the financial year.
The research found hospital financial directors are concerned about low employee morale, as this has been linked to poor standards of care.
2.31pm Can the NHS sidestep the seven deadly sins of innovation?
HSJ is hosting a Twitter chat on 31 January to discuss innovation traps and how they stop new ideas from improving the NHS.
Recently Craig Bennett and Glyn Jones from the innovation team at Lancashire Care Foundation Trust wrote about the pride, sloth, lust, greed, envy, wrath and gluttony could cause the “death of good ideas” in the NHS.
Craig and Glyn will be on Twitter on Friday 31 January from 12.30pm to discuss the seven innovation sins and how best the NHS should “go forth, repent and be free of sin”. Join in using the hashtag #HSJchat.
2.24pm The imbalance between the number of negative and positive news stories about the NHS could be damaging it, argues Karen Castille of the NHS Confederation.
1.32pm Michael White’s latest politics piece is now up - click here to read what Michael has to say about financial mismanagement and accountability in the NHS.
1.25pm The Guardian also carries an interview with Charlotte Walker, aka the Bipolar Blogger which discusses, among other things, the different funding constraints that mental health is facing compared to acute hospitals.
1.11pm There’s a few health pieces in The Guardian’s Society section today. Here’s one on some of the difficulties faced by the nursing regulator, the Nursing and Midwifery Council. These include a critical Commons health select committee report regarding fitness to practice hearing backlogs, and the recent overturning of an NMC decision by a high court judge.
12.53pm Also in The Telegraph (newspaper only), Monday morning at 10am is the busiest time to visit A&E.
According to Health and Social Care Information Centre data nearly 2.9m people attended A&E on a Monday in 2012-13 accounting for 15 per cent of all attendances.
12.51pm Returning to the papers, The Telegraph reports (newspaper only) that the number of detentions made under the Mental Health Act is at a record high according to a CQC report.
In 2012-13 the act was used 50,408 times to detain or treat people using compulsion, up 14 per cent from 2007-08.
The report was critical of the way some patients were being detained with some being told they were going for a “cup of tea” or a “nice chat”.
It was also critical of blanket rules on more than three quarters of mental health wards which prevented patients from calling home, using the internet or using an outdoor space.
The damages, made up of a lump sum and annual payments, will provide a more secure financial future for Samantha Singleton-Parkes, who has cerebral palsy, and comfort and reassurance for her mother Gail, London’s High Court heard.
Solicitor Julian Wilson, of law firm Thompson Smith and Puxon, said later that “mistakes were made” at Colchester Hospital University Foundation Trust following Samantha’s birth that had “led to a catastrophic brain injury”.
12.36pm The number of very elderly people needing to go to hospital by ambulance has risen 81 per cent since 2009-10, according to new figures.
Analysis by Labour showed that 300,370 people over the age of 90 were taken to accident and emergency departments by ambulance in the last year, a substantial rise on previous years. In 2009-10 the figure was 165,910.
12.24pm Here’s David William’s full story on the departure of Stephen Richards from Oxfordshire CCG.
10.39am Fewer than 6 per cent of referrals made under the £400m Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme resulted in “reliable recovery”, data suggests.
The government is investing £400m into the programme to roll it out nationally by the end of 2014-15.
However, Andy Bell, deputy chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health, said it would be “unfair” to say the data indicated “a lack of success”. He added that the success of therapy depended upon the circumstances of people undergoing treatment
The inquiry, which was set up to examine failures at the trust between 2004 and 2008 and has no statutory legal power, will hear evidence behind closed doors, although Dr Kirkup has made provisions for families to attend the sessions.
Dr Kirkup’s decision contrasts with that of Robert Francis’s in his first, independent inquiry into poor care at Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, which also had no statutory powers.
10.26am Talks over plans to impose 20 per cent higher efficiency targets on mental health and community trusts have ended without agreement,HSJ’s Shaun Lintern reports.
In a meeting on Tuesday Monitor and NHS England rebuffed appeals from the Mental Health Network, NHS Confederation and the Foundation Trust Network over their proposal to impose a tariff deflator a fifth higher for non-acute organisations than for their acute counterparts in 2014-15.
They have justified the policy by claiming the costs of implementing the Francis report did not apply to community and mental health sectors.
10.17am Interesting story in the Financial Times: Whitehall has failed to release information about how well senior civil servants have performance against their objectives, despite government claims that a new, more transparent system would allow the public to hold them to account.
Under the Cabinet Office’s civil service reform plan, the government has published the performance objectives for permanent secretaries. Objectives for 2013-14, the second year in which they have been made public, have been released, but no information has been issued about how well the mandarins performed against their goals last year.
According to her personal objectives, the Department of Health permanent secretary Una O’Brien must “lead change in the department of health to foster a high-performing organisation sensitive to the needs of patients and the public”.
10.03am Browsing through this morning’s papers, The Times reports on its front page that an NHS manager was given a £370,000 redundancy payoff despite the fact he never left the health service.
Rob Cooper, a former deputy chief executive at Yorkshire and Humber Strategic Health Authority was paid a sum of between £370,000 and £375,000. By the time the body was abolished he was working as director of finance for South London Healthcare NHS Trust. He now works as interim finance director at Barking, Havering and Redbirdge University NHS Trust.
The paper writes that Mr Cooper is one of three managers paid a total of almost £1m in such circumstances.
9.59am While details are still thin on the ground regarding Mr Richards’ decision to leave the CCG, David Williams tweets: “simple reason is he wanted to move from being CEO to chair, but GPs voted for another guy to become chair.”
9.55am HSJ’s David Williams has the news that Steve Richards, the leader who fronted Oxfordshire CCG’s ambitious and controversial integrated contracting plans has gone.
Follow @dwilliamsHSJ to find out what David has learned about Mr Richard’s departure.
9.43am The Health and Social Care Information Centre has categorised eighteen NHS trusts in England as having a ‘lower than expected’ or a ‘higher than expected’ mortality ratio over two years.
Between July 2011 and June 2013, 12 trusts were categorised as having a ‘lower than expected’ ratio, based on Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) data and six as having a ‘higher than expected’ ratio.
The trusts categorised as lower or higher than expected are as follows.
Higher than expected:
- Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust
- Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
- Wye Valley NHS Trust
- Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
Lower than expected:
- Barts Health NHS Trust
- Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust
- North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust
- Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
- St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust
- The Whittington Hospital NHS Trust
- Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
- University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- North West London Hospitals NHS Trust
- Barnet and Chase Farm Hospitals NHS Trust
- Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
7.00am Welcome to HSJ Live. In Resource Centre this morning, a radical transformation is needed to meet the challenge of providing the right care at the right time for patients approaching the end of their lives, writes Keri Thomas, national clinical lead at the Gold Standards Framework Centre.
“The call for a whole system transformation within the NHS has never been more urgent,” she argues.
“A proactive, integrated cross boundary approach will make better use of current services for people in their final year of life.”
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