CatchOn

Conservative Draft Health Manifesto launched

The Draft Conservative Party Health Manifesto is the first pass at setting the priorities for the 2010 General Election Campaign

The following commitments are made:

• Improve the amount of information on Trust, Hospital, GP’s, doctors and other staff available online.
• Focus on improving cancer and stroke survival rates
• Enable patients to access any healthcare provider that meets NHS Standards
• Open up the NHS to include new Independent and voluntary sector providers  
• Implement  a ‘ payment by results ‘system throughout the NHS
• Give GPs the power to hold patient’s budgets and commission on their behalf
• Link GPs pay to the quality of the results they deliver
• Cut NHS administration costs by a third
• Weight public health funding so that extra resources go to the areas with worst health outcomes
• improve funding for hospices and other providers of palliative care for children and adults

Cogniso Competition Winner

Congratulations to Marie Hoyle of Kakoty Practice who wins the Apple iPod Touch following her entry into our competition at the recent NAPC Conference. Look out for future competitions on our website and look out for the ongoing Cogniso templates as they begin to appear on our website: Business Planning imminent.

Breaking news from HSJ regarding health and social care

In what is claimed by Department of Health sources to be the most radical change to the NHS in decades, a paper to be published by health secretary Andy Burnham on the future “vision” for health policy is thought to include proposals to give the health service much greater involvement in social care.

The vision, considered a trailer for Labour’s manifesto commitments on health policy, is expected to emphasise the need for much closer integration of acute services, community services and social care.

NHS must do more to prevent harm to patients from prescribed medicines after leaving hospital - CQC

A new Care Quality Commission (CQC) report published 27th October highlights that the NHS may be at risk of failing to prevent harm to patients from medicines due to inadequate information sharing.

Medicine-related issues may account for 4% of all hospital admissions and over 10,000 deaths in England a year with an estimated annual cost of £466 million in England is. (Pirmohamed et al, Adverse drug reactions as cause of admission to hospital, BMJ, 2004.)

The CQC highlights areas needing improvement.

The CQC reported that there are risks to the safety of patients when they are prescribed medicines, particularly after leaving hospital. Incidents involving medication, such as prescribing errors and failures to review medication after discharge, were the fourth most commonly reported to the National Patient Safety Agency during 2008. One study estimates around 4% of all hospital admissions are due to preventable medicine-related issues.

81% of GP practices surveyed said when hospitals sent them summaries of the care they had provided to patients, details of medicines prescribed were incomplete or inaccurate ‘all of the time’ or ‘most of the time’.

The CQC also found nearly half of practices were not systematically providing hospitals with information on: previous drug reactions (24%); other existing illnesses, known as co-morbidities (14%); or known allergies (11%), when patients are admitted.

Tackling demand together

The DH have published a toolkit for improving urgent and emergency care pathways by understanding increases in 999 demand. PCTs can use this to inform their commissioning plans for ambulance services and identify areas for action in urgent care.

Tackling rising demand for services can seem like a daunting task. This toolkit helps to break demand down into factors and create manageable workplans to address them and achieve real local change, in line with QIPP – Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention.

It contains examples from practices and PCTs that may help you as you formulate plans for dealing with increasing demand for emergency care in your area.