The Care Quality Commission: Regulating the quality and safety of health and adult social care

The Care Quality Commission: Regulating the quality and safety of health and adult social care: The Care Quality Commission had a difficult task in establishing itself and has not so far achieved value for money in regulating the quality and safety of health and adult social care in England. National Audit Office

Audit Commission Briefing: Joining up health and social care

Audit Commission Briefing: Joining up health and social care: Source: Audit Commission

Area: News

The Audit Commission has published 'Joining Up Health and Social Care - Improving Value for Money Across the Interface' - the second in its series of briefings looking at adult social care.

The report says that integrated working across health and social care offers opportunities for efficiencies and improvements to services, but that NHS and councils have made patchy progress in improving this. It offers guidance to local partnerships, setting out a list of questions to consider, and suggestions for interventions that might help. Please see the link below for details. Audit Commission

NAO briefing for the House of Commons Health Committee: Delivering efficiency savings in the NHS.

NAO briefing for the House of Commons Health Committee: Delivering efficiency savings in the NHS.: This memorandum has been prepared for the Health Committee to support its review of public expenditure. It sets out how the NHS, supported by the Department of Health, plans to deliver efficiency savings of up to £20 billion by 2014-15. National Audit Office

PbR MH Factsheet No. 18 November 201

PbR MH Factsheet No. 18 November 201:

This factsheet provides a short update on recent development work in the commissioning of mental health services.

This month’s factsheet includes information on: Payment by Results guidance for 2012/13, Costing – cluster reference costs, Secure and forensic services, Quality and outcomes, Readiness review and Children & Adolescent Mental Health Service. Department of Health

Download factsheet no. 18 – November 2011 (PDF, 48K)

VIDEO: CQC 'failed' to offer value for money

VIDEO: CQC 'failed' to offer value for money: A report out today says the Care Quality Commission has failed to meet its timetable for inspections and is not offering value for money. BBC News

Lansley urges CCGs which want to remain small to learn from schools

Lansley urges CCGs which want to remain small to learn from schools: Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) should be able to manage the responsibilities of being a statutory body while remaining small if schools can, health secretary Andrew Lansley has argued. GP Online

BMJ analysis: Europe's men need their own health strategy

BMJ analysis: Europe's men need their own health strategy: Source: British Medical Journal (BMJ)

Area: News

The European Commission published a report this summer on the state of men's health in Europe, showing that it lags behind that of women. The authors of this analysis article analyse the problems and call for more policy, practice, and research aimed specifically at men.

Neglect and indignity: Stafford hospital inquiry damns NHS failings

Neglect and indignity: Stafford hospital inquiry damns NHS failings:

£10m inquiry ends with criticism of standards and oversight at hospital where as many as 1,200 patients died in four years

It was the biggest scandal of NHS care in years. Several hundred, possibly as many as 1,200, patients died at Stafford Hospital between 2005 and 2009 after suffering neglect, indignity and shoddy care.

Understaffing meant the hospital's A&E unit often posed a risk to patients' safety. A shocking catalogue of appalling care included receptionists assessing emergency cases, patients dying after falling when they were left unattended and some of the sick being denied food and drink.

To compound matters, the hospital's management did little to rectify the situation, while staff were uncaring and lacking in compassion.

It is no wonder that Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, has become a byword for the dangerously inadequate treatment the NHS sometimes provides.

On Thursday, a 13-monthpublic inquiry into the scandal drew to a close. It has involved 139 days of hearings, 181 witnesses and over a million pages of evidence, and cost over £10m. It ended with severe criticism of almost the entire NHS for not realising earlier what was happening at the hospital, despite an array of what should have been wake-up calls, and then taking action to stop it.

As Tom Kark QC, counsel to the inquiry, said in his closing speech: "There was, it might be thought, throughout the evidence from the major organisations simply a lack of appreciation that their actions and delays had a real effect upon patients lying in beds in the hospital or receiving treatment in A&E."

He was referring to the failings of almost every organisation, and many individuals, in the system of governance that was supposed to ensure the NHS gave patients the best possible medical treatment, and any problems were quickly spotted and solve.

The inquiry, under Robert Francis QC, is the seventh to examine events at Stafford hospital over those years, four of them instigated by the government. Its focus has been not what local patient campaign group Cure The NHS calls "appalling, inhuman care", as that has already been exposed in unsparing detail, but failings of regulation and oversight of the quality and safety of NHS services. Its remit has been to examine "why the serious problems at the trust were not identified and acted on sooner, [and] to identify important lessons to be learnt for the future of patient care".

Francis and his team's investigation into "the role of the commissioning, supervising and regulatory bodies and systems in detecting and correcting deficiencies in service provision" has taken in all the important national and local bodies that patient groups claim should have done more earlier.

They include the Department of Health; health ministers while Labour was in power; the NHS's West Midlands strategic health authority; the Staffordshire town's NHS primary care trust; the Care Quality Commission regulator, which is under heavy criticism over its role in this scandal and other issues; its predecessor, the Healthcare Commission (HCC); and Monitor, which regulates semi-independent foundation trusts. The inquiry has scrutinised "the culture and systems of those organisations in relation to their monitoring role" at Mid Staffs from January 2005 to March 2009.

Francis's final report, due early next year, is likely to criticise many of them. Given the evidence presented, his findings may stain reputations and possibly even end some careers. A previous report he wrote on the appalling care at Mid Staffs was detailed, penetrative and shocking. Few expect less of this one. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, who asked Francis to undertake this inquiry after his predecessor, Andy Burnham, resisted relatives' calls to do so, has kept a close eye on proceedings.

Local bodies – the trust itself, PCT and local council's health scrutiny committee – have been taken to task for not spotting the scandal or doing nothing about it. But it has also investigated what Jeremy Hyam, Cure's barrister, told the inquiry was "at national level … confusion as to who was responsible for monitoring quality of care. What was at stake was the health, welfare and indeed the lives of patients.

"What was lacking was any real system whereby any organisation took responsibility for what a layperson would describe as keeping an eye on things. All supervisory bodies seem to rely on others, but no one was doing it. We cannot say that the external system for assuring and monitoring the quality of care was inadequate. There was in truth no such system."

The inquiry heard detailed accounts of what Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA), a patient safety charity, calls "catastrophic" failings at the hospital and beyond. There was inaction instead of intervention, neglect of duty rather than vigilance, buck-passing where responsibility was needed, and silence from doctors and nurses when whistleblowing might have helped.

Between 2004 and 2008, A&E staff nurse Helene Donnelly submitted more than 50 reports warning hospital managers about the risks to patients from faulty equipment, untrained staff and lack of staff. Despite always ticking the box on the form saying she wanted feedback, she received none. AvMA said: "Helene Donnelly's managers … didn't take any notice of all those incidents."

Steve Walker, chief executive of the NHS Litigation Authority, told the inquiry how, despite repeated attempts over years to get health professionals to be more open when things went wrong, that message had not got as far as the NHS frontline.

When Stafford A&E doctors treated 20-year-old John Moore-Robinson in 2006 they failed to detect that he had a ruptured spleen, and he died. The trust commissioned a report to find out what went wrong; it criticised his treatment and concluded his death was avoidable. But instead of passing a copy to his parents and the coroner who investigated his death, they kept it secret; compounding grief and obstructing justice in the process.

Julie Bailey, who founded Cure The NHS, played a key role in highlighting the terrible conditions at the hospital after her mother, Bella, died there in late 2007 after suffering poor care. A letter in a local newspaper appealing for others with similar experiences led to her being inundated. She has spent much of the last 13 months attending the inquiry, as well as giving her own evidence, besides running her cafe. In her view, the Mid Staffs scandal is about the failure of a vital system. "The evidence shows that nearly all of the commissioning, supervisory and regulatory bodies and their leaders failed to put patients first."

Only the now defunct Healthcare Commissionmay avoid serious censure by Francis, as its detailed report in early 2009 finally forced ministers and the NHS to instigate changes.

While Mid Staffs was a local matter, it will have widespread ramifications. Evidence has raised serious questions about the professionalism of some NHS staff, including the quality, competence and humanity of nursing care, as other recent reports have done, especially in regard to elderly patients. The NHS's much-criticised complaints system, shown to be hopelessly ineffective in Stafford, is imperfect. And the inquiry has heard calls for NHS staff to be put under a legal "duty of candour" about errors, patient safety alerts to be taken much more seriously and hospitals to be prosecuted for safety lapses.

Yesterday was doubly significant for Stafford. Its A&E unit, implicated in many of the hundreds of needless deaths in 2005-08, has begun closing , every night, between 10pm and 8am. A lack of staff means patients' safety cannot be guaranteed, the trust says. The Guardian

Alcohol-induced liver problems soar among young adults

Alcohol-induced liver problems soar among young adults:

The biggest increase was in men and women aged 25 to 29, up by 60% and 88% respectively between 2003 and 2010


There has been a huge increase in the number of young adults treated in hospital for serious liver problems brought on by drinking too much, NHS figures show.
The biggest increase in hospital admissions for alcohol-related liver disease has been seen in 25 to 29-year-olds. In 2002-03 a total of 182 men and 100 women in England were treated for it, but by 2009-10 those figures had risen to 291 and 188, up by 60% and 88% respectively.
Similarly, the number of 30 to 34-year-old men went up from 558 to 873 (56%), while for women it rose from 310 to 522 (68%), confirming what doctors warn is an alarming trend of a rising incidence of the conditions among younger people.
The numbers for 15 to 19-year-olds were much smaller, up from four to eight.
Dr Chris Record, a liver specialist at Newcastle University said alcoholic liver disease used to be rare in young adults but had increased as drinking habits had changed, and was likely to worsen.
"The earlier the age at which children drink, and the more they drink, the greater the chance of developing serious liver disease in adult life. Many patients are now presenting with terminal liver disease in their late 20s and early 30s", he said. The number of young people having their lives ruined by alcohol meant the legal age for consuming alcohol may need to rise from five to 15, Record added.
Analysis of official NHS Hospital Episode Statistics data by Balance, an NHS and police-funded alcohol research and campaign group based in Newcastle, showed that the north-east had experienced by far the biggest leap in such patients. The number of 25 to 29-year-old men admitted rose over the period studied from seven to 41 (486%), while among 30 to 34-year-olds there were big rises among both men, up from 23 to 130 (465%), and women, up 14 to 56 (300%).
"These specialists, who see this frightening escalation of harm to the liver every day, are bang on target when they seek to reverse the 24/7 influences on young people that make drinking, even heavy drinking, the norm for them," said Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, the Royal College of Physicians' special adviser on alcohol.
"Current Westminster policies simply don't go far enough, and our only hope of reversing this damage and death in our young people before it is too late is to directly target the widespread availability of cheap and heavily marketed alcohol across the country."
The British Medical Association also said the figures were "further evidence that the government needs to take serious action on alcohol misuse".
"It must develop a comprehensive strategy that will work across government departments and focus on affordability, availability and promotion of alcohol in our society, particularly amongst young people", said a spokesman.
Colin Shevills, Balance's director, said: "These figures are extremely worrying and demonstrate how starting to drink alcohol at a young age can have a serious impact on your health."
Balance wants ministers to ban alcohol advertising on television, and in cinemas showing anything other than 18-certificate films, and to stop alcohol producers sponsoring sporting and cultural events. The Guardian

Department of Health 'to blame' for CQC failings

Department of Health 'to blame' for CQC failings:

Britain's healthcare watchdog was prevented by the Department of Health from recruiting over 100 inspectors to investigate poor and dangerous practices in hospitals and care homes despite under-spending its budget by £42m, a damning report reveals today. As a result, at one stage last year, the Care Quality Commission was carrying out fewer than 130 inspections for safety and quality a month – less than half its target. Serious concerns have been raised about the effectiveness of the CQC which has been accused of missing some of the worst cases of abuse and poor standards of care in nursing homes and hospitals. The Independent