Project launched with sister title LGC to identify most influential people in the integration of health and care services, plus the rest of today’s comment and news.

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4.47pm New on the Hospital Transformation channel, we consider what the NHS’s first emergency-only hospital – due to open next spring – will mean for emergency care. We also look at how it will work and the years of public consultation before work began.

HSJ Hospital Transformation is HSJ’s hub for articles about the improvement journey of English hospitals. Here you will find analysis, trends, best practice, interviews and peer learning that explore challenges, propose solutions and share experiences of success and failure.

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3.44pm The BMA has commented on a story mentioned earlier today on HSJ Live about the possible link between the reduced affordability of alcohol and a fall in violent crime.

Professor Sheila Hollins, chair of the BMA’s board of science, said:

“We know there is a link between the cost and consumption of alcohol, highlighted again in this study, which is why the BMA is calling for a minimum unit price of at least 50p per unit to tackle problem drinking.

“This makes the government’s U-turn on minimum pricing, as well as their decision to scrap the alcohol escalator and reduce beer duty, all the more worrying.

“Alcohol misuse places serious strain on a number of already overstretched public services which is why doctors, the police and emergency services all support minimum unit pricing.

“Prevention is better - and cheaper - than cure, and if the government is serious about tackling alcohol related harm, it needs review its position on minimum unit pricing, which would reduce harm amongst the heaviest drinkers while leaving responsible drinkers largely unaffected.”

3.40pm Southern Health Foundation Trust has received a new warning notice from the CQC.

Monitor opened an investigation into the trust in December 2013, in response to problems uncovered by the Care Quality Commission at the trust’s learning disability services in Oxfordshire.

According to a press release from Monitor, the regulator’s investigation “found that the trust must act faster to improve the quality of care in Oxfordshire and must improve the way it manages its services to make sure the problems identified by CQC cannot be repeated elsewhere”.

Paul Streat, regional director at Monitor, said: “The trust has failed to act quickly enough to improve services in Oxfordshire and must get the right processes in place to ensure action is taken to fix problems quickly.

“The agreement we’ve reached today will see the trust deliver real improvements in its services and will make sure that this continues in the future.”

3.36pm New candidates have been elected for the BMA’s council, including anti-privatisation campaigner Dr Jacky Davis.

You can see the full list of who was elected in the poll here.

3.04pm Interesting story on The Guardian website: the cost of treating NHS patients will be examined in a new Channel 4 “interactive” documentary that the broadcaster says gives viewers the chance to “decide for themselves who should receive the treatment”.

With the working title of “NHS: The Cost of Living”, news that the series has been commissioned comes on the same day that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence decided that a breast cancer drug is too expensive for routine use (see earlier on HSJ Live).

According to Channel 4 the series will have, “a live presence through the broadcast of the documentaries [and] this innovative format will challenge viewers to decide for themselves who should receive the treatment and how the NHS should spend its rapidly depleting funds”.

Exact details are still being worked out of how the programme will work – however, it will not be a kind of Patient Idol or X-ray Factor style-show as viewers will not actually have the final say on who receives the treatment, only register their opinions on either a website or Twitter feed.

1.24pm Interactive maps of 18 week waiting times around England are now available on Rob Findlay’s HSJ blog.

The maps shows the pressures and one-year-waits, with links to all the detail by organisation and specialty.

1.21pm HSJ, in partnership with our sister title Local Government Chronicle, has launched a project to identify the 50 most influential people in the integration of health and care services.

To learn more about the project and to find out how you can nominate individuals driving integration, click here.

12.33pm Psychological medicine, or liaison psychiartry as it is also known, specialises in providing mental health care in acute hospitals. It is therefore unsurprising that it is attracting new interest as the NHS prioritises the integration of services.

Michael Yousif, consultant psychiatrist at Oxford University Hospitals Trust, writes for HSJ on the steps his organisation took to address the challenge of integrating mental health and physical healthcare.

12.27pm Michael White’s latest politics column is now online. In it Michael argues that the NHS needs to take bold steps to cope with a “grey tsunami” of older patients.

10.53am Doctors are the best judges of when public resources should be used for patient care, a leading medic has declared.

Mark Porter, the BMA council chair, also claimed the health service is too often being used for political leverage.

10.47am GlaxoSmithKline and Swiss rival Novartis are to create a consumer healthcare powerhouse as part of a string of deals affecting their oncology and vaccines portfolios.

The tie-up will create a business with annual revenues of around £6.5bn from Glaxo products such as Aquafresh and Beechams and antiseptic range Savlon and cough and cold brand Tixylix from Novartis.

In addition, Glaxo is selling its oncology portfolio and related research and development activities to Novartis for up to 16 billion US dollars (£9.5bn) and buying the Swiss firm’s vaccines business for an initial 5.25 billion US dollars (£3.1bn).

10.38am The Daily Mail reports that a pensioner died after a two-hour wait on his bathroom floor for an ambulance.

William Gouldburn, 73, collapsed at home but was not regarded a “red” emergency despite seven 999 calls.

A coroner has rules that his life might have been saved if medics had reached him sooner, and said the tragedy was a “sad conserquence” of a lack of ambulances.

10.26am The Care Quality Commission has issued three warning notices to Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust - the first mental health provider inspected under its new inspection regime.

The CQC found that above average bed occupancy “had a negative impact” on its ability to provide separate accommodation for men and women, while staff shortages on some wards reduced their ability “to provide consistent and compassionate care”.

10.09am The Guardian has a story which is receiving a lot of coverage today: a decline in binge drinking and the rising price of alcohol may be behind a 12 per cent drop in the number of people injured in serious violence across England and Wales, according to new research.

An estimated 234,509 people sought treatment at accident and emergency departments across England and Wales in 2013 - 32,780 fewer than in 2012, according to the national violence surveillance network developed by Cardiff University.

10.02am The Times also reports that thousands of women with breast cancer have been told that a drug that could lengthen their life and has fewer side-effects than other therapies is too expensive for routine use.

The decision has prompted calls for an overhaul of the way the NHS assesses cancer treatments.

10.00am The Times reports that migraine sufferers could be given hope after pioneering jabs were shown for the first time to prevent attacks.

Two drugs effectively halved migraine attacks over several week in trials that experts said made it “an exciting day” for Britain’s eight million migraine victims.

9.49am NHS England has begun detailed work on how to pool its primary care budgets with other commissioners, one of its senior leaders has revealed.

Head of primary care commissioning David Geddes told HSJ that leaders in its regional and local teams had begun a project to “explore how far” it can develop co-commissioning and pooling.

9.46am An exclusive from HSJ’s David Williams: many NHS and council leaders will assess the effectiveness of the government’s £3.8bn plan to integrate health and social care with performance measures on dementia, falls and long-term conditions.

This is the chief finding from an HSJ analysis of 60 draft better care fund submissions, many of which were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

7.00am Good morning. On the CQC’s new hospital ratings system Ridouts partner Neil Grant argues that it is inconsistent and the provider handbook needs to provide clearer guidance about how the ratings work.