The chief executive and chief nurse of Barts and The London NHS Trust have resigned from their posts days after the trust declared a deficit of £93m plus the rest of the days news

Live logo

5.20pm: NEW Devon’s Dr Jenner is now addressing the debate:

 

5.06pmThe Nuffield Council’s Nigel Edwards delivers this characterisation of the NHS rationing debate

 

5.01pm Ipsos MORI’s Mr Page tells debate the public unlikely to accept rationing of health services.

 

4.53pm Some more data from Ipsos Mori’s Mr Page.

 

4.52pm Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page is now doing some scene setting, discussion the public’s expectations of health care.

 

4.47pm The controversial rationing plan of NEW Devon CCG has already been raised in the debate, according to Will Hazell.

 

4.06pm HSJ’s Will Hazell will soon be covering a debate on health care commission, hosted by the Nuffield Trust and the Royal College of Surgeons.

We will be posting highlight from his twitter feed here from 4.30pm.

Alternatively, you can follow Will on: @whazell

 

3.36pm Umbrella group NHS Providers has reacted to the proposed tariff deal, unveiled by NHS England and Monitor.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, the represented “important and much-needed progress on finalising the 2015-16 tariff” but warned that a “long term sustainable solution” the service’s financial problems was “still desperately needed”.

“NHS providers will be unable to provide the right quality of patient care, achieve performance targets and deliver the Five Year Forward View until this long term sustainable solution is in place,” he added.

“It’s critical that we do not rob Peter to pay Paul. It’s appropriate that ambulance, community and mental health trusts will benefit from the change in the efficiency factor.

“It is concerning that the extra funding for delivery of the new mental health standards and targets appears to be dependent on the selection of the enhanced tariff offer and there are few other improvements for non-acute trusts.

2.14pm A report commissioned by Calderdale Council appears to reject a case to reshape hospital services in Calderdale and Greater Huddersfield.

It says there is  ‘not convincing evidence’ that proposals to reconfigure hospital services across the areas would  ‘produce better health outcomes for our population or represent good value for money’.

Calderdale Council set up the People’s Commission, chaired by Oxford Brookes University professor Andrew Kerslake, in the wake of local opposition to proposals drafted by providers. These include plans to downgrade  an accident and emergency unit.

2.10pm A London clinical commissioning group has decided to retender its integrated urgent care and out of hours services contract after it was threatened with a legal challenge from an unsuccessful bidder.

Greenwich CCG said it will “rewind” the tender process after unsuccessful bidder Grabadoc Healthcare Society claimed the group failed to keep to a requirement that providers would have to deliver the three year contract for no more than £13.8m.

Greenwich CCG said it will “rewind” the tender process after unsuccessful bidder Grabadoc Healthcare Society claimed the group failed to keep to a requirement that providers would have to deliver the three year contract for no more than £13.8m.

12.59pm. We’ve just posted a story on the Bart’s resignations.

This flags up a report from the Royal College of Nursing published earlier this month that showed Barts as the biggest spender on agency nurses.

RCN London operational manager Sue Tarr said: “Barts Health is simultaneously running both the highest deficit and the highest agency nursing bill in the country, while nursing vacancies are up around 15 per cent.”

12.32am Separately, the Daily Mail reports that elderly people should not be woken up early to fit in with care home staff rotas and save them extra work, new guidelines say.

Inspections have uncovered cases where residents are woken in the early hours – in one case as early as 4am – for the convenience of staff.

The lives of thousands of elderly and vulnerable people in care homes are also being put at risk because staff do not bother to make sure that residents get enough to eat, the National Institute for Care and Health Excellence has warned.

12.22am Returning to the newspapers now with this story from the Daily Mail, reporting a warning from health economists that the NHS cancer drugs fund has done more harm than good by paying too much for new drugs.

Experts from the University of York claim that paying over the odds for cancer drugs means the health service is being starved of money to spend on patients with different diseases.

The money spent on expensive drugs would have would have done five times more good if spent elsewhere in the NHS.

Their report says that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which decides whether drugs are cost effective enough to be made available on the NHS, is also approving drugs that are too expensive for the health service to afford.

11.57am Some more background on those resignations at Barts from our story this month that revealed the trust’s deficit had doubled.

As we reported two weeks’ ago, the trust’s finance director Mark Ogden stepped down at the start of this month for personal reasons with Ian Miller has been appointed interim finance manager.

Barts is also awaiting the publication of two different Care Quality Commission reports, one into Whipps Cross University Hospital and another into Newham University and the Royal London hospitals.

Discussion on the report into its Whipps Cross site by directors suggested the CQC will criticise the hospital over equipment failures.

Trust chief executive Peter Morris described the inspectors’ finding that some staff said they were too scared of “repercussions” to report problems relating to patient care as “a tragedy”.

The trust is still not submitting data on its elective care backlog because of IT issues

11.48am Here is some background on Bart’s £93m deficit. HSJ’s Ben Clover covered the Barts’ February board meeting where it was revealed. Here are some of his tweets from that event.

 

11.29am The chief executive and chief nurse of Barts and The London NHS Trust have resigned from their posts days after the trust declared a deficit of £93m.

In a statement, the trust said Peter Morris had stepped down to allow the “process for the appointment of a successor to begin and an orderly hand-over to take place”.

Mr Morris said he had set a personal five-year target to “overhaul the fragile network of acute services that were operating in east London, and deliver the improvements to local healthcare that were so desperately needed”.

Chief nurse Kay Riley said it had been a “privilege and a pleasure to use the opportunity given to me as Chief Nurse to take forward and develop the ethos of innovative and compassionate nursing”.

More to follow…

11.21am Turning to the newspapers now, the Daily Telegraph reports that NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens is calling for increases in the price of cheap alcohol because heavy drinking is taking a “huge” toll on accident and emergency departments.

He suggests action on alcohol pricing should be an immediate priority for the next government, as he warned that its relative price in supermarkets had halved in three decades.

Mr Stevens said the NHS needed to “stand up and be counted” to highlight the impact of alcohol on A&E departments.

Also in the , the Welsh government has cut the health service budget – despite a series of scandals – while spending has risen in England, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said.Daily Telegraph

According to the paper, the economic forecaster said that in Wales spending on the health service had fallen by 2 per cent since 2010, while it had risen by 4 per cent in England.

11.18am Turning to the newspapers now, the Daily Telegraph reports that NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens is calling for increases in the price of cheap alcohol because heavy drinking is taking a “huge” toll on accident and emergency departments.

He suggests action on alcohol pricing should be an immediate priority for the next government, as he warned that its relative price in supermarkets had halved in three decades.

Mr Stevens said the NHS needed to “stand up and be counted” to highlight the impact of alcohol on A&E departments.

11.02am The Health and Social Care Information Centre will suspend the collection of the secondary uses service data for nearly two weeks as part of a process to bring collection of the vital NHS dataset in-house, HSJ can reveal.

The data service, also known as SUS, will be unavailable from 5pm on Friday until 3 March as the system is moved from a BT system to a new in-house system. The information centre has said any impact on trusts would be “very low”

10.28am As HSJ’s Ben Clover points out, there is an interesting debate about the new tariff proposal unfolding below the line of our story.

One anonymous poster says this “self-induced crisis illustrates why costing and pricing needs to be taken away from Monitor”.

Richard Russell says the proposed deal “sets the precedent that marginal rates on planned activity are acceptable”.

Another anonymous commentator questions whether there the proposed new arrangements will lead to some “unintended consequences”.

“Providers have no disincentive to do more emergency work..many [clinical commissioning groups] got a significant cut in winter funding by it appearing as a token in the allocation.

“Throw in the devastating cuts to social care and this will play out in A&E and emergency care.

“Has anyone modelled the impact of this?”

10.08am HSJ editor Alastair McLellan has written his leader about the new tariff proposal. The decision of NHS England and Monitor to switch £500m of risk on to commissioners during 2015-16 will be seen as an outright victory for providers, he says.

Hospitals have won significant concessions by loudly demonstrating their distress over further tariff reductions.

For the full piece, see here.

9.52am Hospitals will be offered reduced savings targets and changes to a controversial cap on specialised care payments in a £500m bid by NHS England and Monitor to agree prices before the start of 2015-16, HSJ has learned.

The chief executives of the two national pricing authorities are set to write to all NHS providers today to lay out details of a new tariff offer that trusts can sign up to on a “voluntary” basis for the coming financial year.

Providers will be given just two weeks to decide whether to accept the offer.

Get copies of the letter and response forms here.

9.45am Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust has become the first mental health trust in the country to be put into special measures.

Monitor, the health sector regulator, has acted after the Care Quality Commission’s chief inspector of hospitals gave the trust an overall rating of ‘inadequate’ earlier this month.

An inspection by the CQC identified a number of serious problems, including concerns about the safety of services, staffing levels and leadership at the trust.

More to follow…

7am Good morning and welcome to HSJ Live. We begin with a piece by Matthew Shelley who says you should never assume successful ways of working in other industries are not be applicable to healthcare.