Health News Blog

400 staff a week are quitting the NHS
A record number of more than 400 workers in England have left NHS every week; reasons cited are burn out and post traumatic stress disorder. There are now concerns that the exodus is impacting the quality of care.

No requirement for ICB to give emergency care
The NHS Bill does not require an Integrated Care Board (ICB) to provide emergency care for everybody in its area. This will mean more bureaucracy and potential arguments as ICBs bill each other for people who are visitors and who require A&E care.

Centene GP take over: it's not unlawful
The High Courts did not rule that the decision by North Central London Clinical Commissioning Group to allow Operose Health (Centene by another name) take over the London GP chain ATMedics Ltd. was unlawful. Patients have demonstrated outside their surgeries; they do not want their practice taken over by an American corporation.

NHS contract removed from PCR rules
The Public Contracts Regulations of 2015 (PCR 2015) ensure that environmental, social, and labour legislation is taken into consideration when public contracts are arranged. The NHS Bill permits PCR2015 to be excluded in commissioning NHS contracting arrangements. A government consultation on this subject is linked here.

Covid contracts: Serco's profits surge
The so-called "NHS" test and trace system - actually entirely run by private companies - was described by the National Accounts Committee as failed despite its "eye watering' budget of £37,000 million of our money. Serco benefited through a £623 million contract to manage Covid testing sites and operating contact-tracing call centres. Now we hear that Serco has paid out £100 million to its shareholders.

NHS bill: destroys the Bevan model of care
The bill has been presented with positive buzzwords around integration and collaboration. But campaigners warn that the new proposals are a form of privatisation by stealth. For the first time since the creation of the NHS the state will continue to fund healthcare in England but largely abstain from being involved in its organisation.

NHS bill: campaigners discuss its impact
Peter Roderick and Allysson Pollock discuss the impact of the NHS Bill, revealing how rules governing who gets healthcare will be made by NHS England not parliament. It's the Americanisation of our health service.

New testing centres need 6000 new staff
In a headline catching announcement in October last year, the government plans to set up new regional early diagnostic testing centres. But where will the 6000 staff needed for them come from?

Profit motives have no place in our health service
Under the lastest contract with private hospitals they will be paid a minimum amount up to £90 million per month, a substantially higher rate than the NHS.

Inequality in the NHS
A new report shows that the health service, like other institutions, has a deep-seated problem, a blight that Covid has made harder to ignore.

Why no NHS staffing plan?
Sajid Javid has announced a delivery plan to tackle the backlog in an NHS that has 100,000 vacancies including about 8,000 medical and 40,000 nursing professionals. All successful organisations rely on long-term workforce planning to meet demand, so why do we treat the NHS and social care as an exception? 

Doctors call for action on racial inequality report
Health officials have paid lip service to racism in the NHS for years, but that has got us nowhere. The voices calling for real action come from all dirtections.

A depressing analysis of the NHS Bill
Peter Roderick and Allyson Pollock reveal the awful truth about the government's NHS Bill - it's the end of the Bevan model of high quality comprehensive healthcare.

Do you know what PHM is?
The NHS Bill introduces Population Health Management into the NHS. To quote NHS England "PHM uses data to understand what factors are driving poor outcomes in different population groups". But don't we know already what these are - poor diet, inadequate housing, lack of exercise, occupational factors? Here, a campaigner takes the PHM's advocates to task.

Dido Harding's appointment was unlawful
Well, did you expect otherwise? Yet another example of Johnson government illegal trickery; well done the Good Law Project.

Denied emergency care twice
Look what the Tories are doing to our NHS. Now you may get emergency care only from the A&E nearest to your home. A woman with severe burns was advised owing to a 5 hour wait to go to another A&E (Rochdale), but then was told by Fairfield Hospital in Bury that they wouldn't treat her, "go back to Rochdale".

NHS patients 'warehoused' in "care hotels"
Inadequate care home provision in England's disastrous social care service has forced NHS England to invent "care hotels" - hotels that offer so-called "domicillary care" owqing to a shortage of homecare workers. In this one in Plymouth a bath is full of clinical waste.

Do we need management consultants to plan backlog care?
NHS England will fund integrated care systems to spend up to £42 million on management consultancies help with elective recovery plans. Wouldn't spending this huge sum on employing more doctors and nurses be more effective? There are 100,000 vacancies in the NHS.

Repairing the NHS: ministers are the problem
New waiting list targets will achieve nothing if the government refuses to commit to workforce planning. "The truth is that Tory resistance to forward planning, as well as insufficient spending, lies at the heart of the NHS’s difficulties."

27% rise in NHS spending on private healthcare
This article, behind a paywall, says in down to the pandemic. No, it's down to a decade of underfunding: the NHS was totally unprepared for a pandemic. Despite cash boosts in 2018 and 2019 the NHS budgets rose on average just 1.4% per year, compared to 3.7% average rises since the NHS was established, and an average of over 5% throught the Blair/Brown eras.