Sixteen local authorities failed to pass on hundreds of thousands of pounds allocated to fund NHS complaints advocacy services, plus the rest of today’s news and comment.

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3.16pm This week HSJ will reveal its second annual list of the exceptional chief executives leading NHS provider organisations.

HSJ Top Chief Executives 2015 will recognise 50 outstanding leaders of English NHS provider organisations.

This year our judges have also ranked their top 15 chief executives.

The countdown of the top 15 leaders will begin on Wednesday at 7.30am, culminating in the number one chief executive and the full list being revealed exclusively on the HSJ app at 3pm.

Digital subscribers can download the app from the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store. Once downloaded, navigate to “Magazine” to read it.

The list will be revealed for all subscribers on hsj.co.uk at 7.30am on Thursday.

2.24pm An investment firm has put £1.65m into what it claims to be the first social impact bond in the health service.

Bridges Ventures is putting the money into the bond, commissioned by Newcastle West Clinical Commissioning Group, which will be used to fund the Ways to Wellness programme to help patients manage long term conditions.

2.15pm The chair of the inquiry into poor maternity care and deaths at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Foundation Trust has said he was ‘disappointed’ by the response of professional bodies to his report.

Bill Kirkup told HSJ he wanted to see more “professional leadership” from bodies such as the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Midwives.

The Kirkup investigation, published earlier this month, found that failures at “almost every level of the NHS” created a “lethal mix” which caused the avoidable deaths of at least 11 babies and one mother at Furness General Hospital.

But Dr Kirkup said the response from professional groups in the weeks following the report had been “quite muted”.

12.34pm Sixteen local authorities failed to pass on hundreds of thousands of pounds specifically allocated by central government to fund NHS complaints advocacy services, with one council retaining 79 per cent of the money it received, HSJ can reveal.

According to data collected by Healthwatch England under the Freedom of Information Act, shared exclusively with HSJ, 13 councils failed to hand on more than £50,000 each to their advocacy provider and three failed to pass on more than £100,000.

12.33pm Here’s another tweet from the event:

12.32pm David Cameron has been heckled by pensioners about the NHS at an Age UK event. Here’s what The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon tweeted:

11.33am The paper’s health editor, Laura Donnelly, reports that doctors should not always intervene to save the lives of premature babies just because medical advances mean they might succeed, they are today told in new guidance.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said increased survival rates for infants born between 22 and 25 weeks over the last decade should not be used as a reason to continue treatment in cases where babies were left with a “non-existent” quality of life.

New guidance on life-limiting and life-threatening conditions in children urges doctors to carefully weigh up the likely suffering of the young patient versus the potential benefits of continued treatment.

11.27am The Telegraph reports that an elderly man who collapsed from severe blood poisoning was forced to wait for 20 minutes in the back of an ambulance with his anxious wife while a paramedic went shopping in Marks and Spencer, a care standards tribunal has heard.

On another occasion Dominic Colella, who was responding to potentially life threatening 999 calls, delayed a patient with a head injury from being taken to hospital so he could have his hair cut.

Colella, who has since resigned from the London Ambulance Service, is facing two counts of misconduct with the Health and Care Professions Council.

10.59am Elsewhere, The Telegraph write that NHS hospitals have paid doctors and nurses record sums amid a spiralling crisis in Accident & Emergency departments, new figures show.

Locum medics were able to charge up to £3,200 each per shift, with agency nurses on unprecedented rates of up to almost £1,900 a day, as casualty units struggled to cope this winter, an investigation has found.

The figures show that as hospitals suffered the worst A&E performance on record over Christmas and New Year, several NHS trusts became almost entirely dependent on agency staff.

10.55am The paper also reports that cancer doctors have disputed claims that five-year-old cancer suffer Ashya King has made a “miracle recovery”.

His parents, who were jailed when they took him abroad for brain cancer treatment, yesterday said their son would have died, if he had not been given proton therapy treatment in Prague which the NHS had refused him.

They said that recent scans at the Proton Therapy Centre in Prague, where he received the treatment last year, had showed no signs of tumour

10.49am The Daily Telegraph reports that survival rates for common cancers in the UK are trailing at least a decade behind other European countries, a charity has warned.

Macmillan Cancer Support said survival rates in Britain were “shameful” with many other countries doing better in the 1990s than the UK has managed recently.

The new analysis examined survival rates for breast cancer, bowel cancer, stomach cancer and lung cancer.

10.37am An investment firm has announced what it claims is the first social impact bond to help people with long term health conditions to go live anywhere in the world.

Bridges Ventures, a specialist fund manager dedicated to sustainable and impact investment, has agreed to invest £1.65m in a new social impact bond designed to improve the health outcomes of over 11,000 people in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area.

Over 15 million people in the UK suffer from long-term health conditions such as diabetes, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart disease. Most experience poorer health outcomes and reduced quality of life as a result. They are also proportionately higher users of health services: 70 per cent of national NHS spend is on patients with these conditions.

To address this issue, a newly-formed organisation called Ways to Wellness has developed a programme based on the concept of ‘social prescribing’ – the use of non-medical interventions to achieve sustained lifestyle change and improved self-care among people with long-term health conditions.

Services will be delivered by four social sector organisations, selected following a procurement process: Changing Lives, First Contact Clinical, HealthWORKS Newcastle and Mental Health Concern. 

The Ways to Wellness programme will be funded by a social impact bond commissioned by the NHS Newcastle West Clinical Commissioning Group, Big Lottery Fund’s commissioning better outcomes and the Cabinet Office’s social outcomes fund. Through the commissioning better outcomes scheme, the Big Lottery Fund will pay up to £2m in outcomes payments and the Cabinet Office’s social outcomes fund will support Ways to Wellness with up to £1m in payments. Bridges claims it will be the first social impact bond specifically designed to help people with long-term health conditions to go live anywhere in the world.

Bridges will be the sole investor in the Ways to Wellness social impact bond, investing £1.65m. It will then work closely with the providers concerned. The contracts are structured on an ‘outcomes payment’ basis, so investors will only be paid according to the level of improvement achieved in health outcomes.

10.24am HSJ is holding a webinar panel of highly respected figures in NHS management tomorrow for a discussion on understanding the true cost of overseas migrants to the NHS.

David Savage, head of legal support for the NHS Standard Contract at NHS England, along with Sir Keith Pearson, adviser to the Department of Health’s Visitor and Migrant Cost Recovery Programme, and Kate Dixon, deputy director and programme lead of the Cost Recovery Programme, will discuss the true costs of treating visitors and migrants not entitled to free NHS care in a free HSJ webinar.

The webinar, “Fairness for all: charging international visitors for NHS services”, is free to watch at 11am. Simply register at hsj.co.uk/hsj-tv. It will be streamed live or you can catch up at a later date.

It is run in association with the Department of Health’s Visitor and Migrant Cost Recovery Programme.

10.00am Good morning and welcome to HSJ Live.

The group of trusts hope the contract will bring down the cost of hiring locum doctors and be a “blueprint” for organisations across the English health service.