Seven major leading cancer charities including McMillian Cancer Care and Marie Curie have jointly published On the brink: The future of end of life care.
This report finds that too many people approaching death are forced to spend long periods of time in hospital due to a lack of social care or alternative support options in their community. This in turn leads to increased hospital admissions and higher costs for an NHS under financial pressures.
Published on Feb 23, 2016. Narrated by: Lynda Ware, Cochrane UK’s Senior Fellow in General Practice
This slide cast explains what Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is and it’s history and how we can use EBM to make informed health choices.
This guide is for:
It explains the duties and responsibilities of health professionals who deal with children and young people with special educational needs and disability (SEND) and their families.
This guide should be read alongside the ‘Special education needs and disability code of practice: 0 to 25’.
Read the full overview here
Read the full report here
With March marking a year since the first wave of vanguards were announced, a new animation (see below) and suite of factsheets shine a light on what the sites are up to and what’s in store for patients and communities across the country.
Launched on Thursday (25 February), the resources explain the aims and objectives of the country’s 50 health and care vanguards.
Aimed at health and care staff, patients and the public, the resources also showcase some of the innovative work happening across the country that’s making a difference to people’s lives.
The factsheets explore the five types of care models the vanguards fall under:
Find out more via NHS Confederation
Public Health England’s chief economist has published the first in a series of four blogs looking at health economics and the case for investing in prevention initiatives. The blog focuses on four key questions: does prevention save the health service money; are public health initiatives really providing the best value for money; and how can we better incentivise local authorities, NHS commissioners and health care providers to invest more in prevention and early intervention.
It has been described as the biggest shakeup in the profession’s history. In April, all nurses and midwives will have to regularly demonstrate that they “practise safely and effectively” under a new rigorous system of revalidation if they want to work in the UK.
The new system, which was recommended following the Mid Staffs hospital scandal, aims to improve public protection by making sure that the UK’s 655,000 nurses and midwives are up to date in their training and skills and that they continue to remain fit to practise throughout their career.
Under revalidation, which replaces the current Post-Registration Education and Practice (Prep) requirements, nurses and midwives will have to revalidate every three years when they apply to renew their place on the register of the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). From April, nurses and midwives seeking reregistration will have to provide evidence they have completed 450 hours of practice per register entry over the preceding three years; completed 40 hours of continuing professional development (CPD) learning, 20 hours of which need to be participatory.
Furthermore, they have to deliver five written reflections based on four themes in a new code of professional standards; have evidence of feedback from others including patients, relatives and colleagues and have third-party confirmation of continuing fitness to practise. This is likely to be from a line manager. As part of the process, they will also have to declare that they have professional indemnity insurance and that they are of good health and character.
The NMC recommends that nurses and midwives set up an NMC online account so they can find out the deadline for revalidation and when their registration expires. Help is being provided by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which has a number of advice leaflets and CPD resources on its website under a special learning zone. A telephone helpline has also been set up.
View the full news story here
The UK health sector employs more than 2.1 million people; 40% of those are support staff. This infographic reveals statistics behind those workers:
View the full news article here
By Sarah Chapman for the Evidently Cochrane Blog // February 12, 2016
There is new evidence on how tailoring a discharge plan to the individual compares with a routine process of discharging people from hospital, from a Cochrane review comparing these approaches.
Discharge planning: routine or personalized?
The review broadly defines the aims of discharge planning as these:
The Cochrane review has just been updated and includes 30 randomized controlled trials (5 from the UK) with almost 12,000 people. Older patients with a medical condition were recruited in 21 trials and data from these were pooled. The remaining trials involved people with a mix of medical and surgical conditions, patients from psychiatric hospitals and others admitted to hospital following a fall.
Here’s what they found:
Read the full blog post here
Read the full review here
Maternity services in England must become safer, more personalised, kinder, professional and more family-friendly. That’s the vision of the National Maternity Review, which today (Tuesday) publishes its recommendations for how services should change over the next five years.
The NHS England commissioned review – led by independent experts and chaired by Baroness Julia Cumberlege – sets out wide-ranging proposals designed to make care safer and give women greater control and more choices.
The framework highlights seven key priorities to drive improvement and ensure women and babies receive excellent care wherever they live. To make care more personal and family friendly, the report says that the following is needed:
The report also recommends that NHS England seeks volunteer localities to act as early adopters to test the model of care set out in the report determine which flexibilities are required, and identify the most viable solutions for the long term.
Read the full report here
Related video:
Baroness Cumberlege, Chair of the National Maternity Review, explains the key recommendations of the Review’s report and what they mean for the future of maternity services.
This paper argues that the NHS in England cannot meet the health care needs of the population without a sustained and comprehensive commitment to quality improvement as its principal strategy.
Despite a succession of well-meaning policy initiatives over the past two decades, the paper argues that the NHS in England has lacked a coherent approach to improving quality of care. It describes key features of a quality improvement strategy and the role of organisations at different levels in realising it, offering 10 design principles to guide its development. A quality improvement strategy of this kind has never been implemented at such a scale and the challenge in doing so is immense – yet the paper argues that the NHS has no real alternative.
Read the full report here
