Mike Farrar, the head of the NHS Confederation, said the new NHS system provides some big opportunities to improve healthcare, but the focus must remain on the major challenges ahead.

This is the biggest ever reorganisation of the NHS system and it is necessary to keep improving care and the way things work. The commissioning organisations’ clinical expertise will be a huge asset and the NHS needs to take full advantage of it.

The reforms aim to:

• put patients at the centre of the NHS
• create a focus on quality and improving outcomes
• strengthen clinical leadership, particularly of commissioning
• create a shift from NHS provided to NHS-funded care
• provide greater plurality of provision and competitive market place
• put the emphasis on local decision making
• focus on improving accountability of the NHS
• shift responsibility for public health to local authorities.

The system might be new but it still faces same challenges, coping with financial pressures, improving the quality of care and restoring public confidence in the services that people use and the staff that provide them. (more…)

The NHS has experienced numerous attempts to free staff from the shackles of unnecessary paperwork to allow more time for patient care. These efforts have seemed little more than pruning projects − bureaucracy is cut back for a short period before it grows back thicker and stronger the next year. In the wake of Mid Staffs, public and political desire for greater external assurance is growing. The NHS is under pressure to improve the quality of patient care, restore public confidence and be open and accountable. With a raft of new NHS organisations due to come into force on 1 April we risk increasing the bureaucratic and regulatory burden even further.

A smarter system of information use is needed, not a bigger one; a digital NHS, not a paper-based archaic NHS. Mid Staffs revealed the difficulties the NHS faces. There was a difference between the experience of patients and the perspective the regulators held about the quality of care. Some of this was about regulators not having real-time data (which can easily be solved by adopting Infomatrix OneView’s Infohealth solution), some was about the way data was distributed across a number of regulators and inspectors. (more…)

The NHS faces an unprecedented financial dilemma: the supply of funding is struggling to match the growing rate of demand for healthcare.

The rising costs and increased regulation have created exceptional challenges across the NHS and cater the need of an effective healthcare solution. Infomatrix has developed a healthcare solution in collaboration with Infohealth Solutions, the OneView Medical Device Asset Management (f2), which is a post-modern healthcare solution to managing information needs in the healthcare sector.

The OneView Platform, a multiple data source combined to be displayed in a single view and accessed online as a form of web based reporting, this enables users to upload information and spread sheets to create reports and perform in-depth analyses from multi-dimensional analytics in real time, thus improving the efficiency of any NHS trust.

Mike Farrar, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, says the NHS has reached the point where its financial predicament is on a scale we have never seen before. We have been slow to change the NHS into a truly modern and efficient service, and are now beginning to see the consequences. We are wrestling with a flat budget while demand for services is increasing above the rate of inflation. We have an ageing population, increasing technology costs and are seeing the major impact that lifestyle choices are having on our services.

Farrar adds that despite a two-year pay freeze, pay costs are not falling as fast as they might have done, due largely to incremental salary growth. Finances and quality of care go hand-in-hand. Once financial problems in an organisation emerge, NHS trusts can quickly get caught in a spiral of decline. Recruitment of doctors and nurses becomes more difficult, leaving trusts with expensive short-term staffing. Organisations struggle to attract good senior managers, leaving them reliant on expensive interim directors, and there is usually significant change at board level.

The NHS Confederation has published a report looking at the financial pressures on the NHS and presents 4 choices we face: (more…)

Reading’s two Labour parliamentary hopefuls are warning “nearly all” local NHS services could face privatisation under new Government rules. The new directive for NHS procurement has come under attack from doctors’ organisations.

Matt Rodda, Labour candidate for Reading East, said the new regulations showed that the true purpose had always been to break up the NHS.

Councillor Rodda, who is deputy lead on health on Reading Borough Council, said: “The new rules pushing compulsory competitive tendering follow the privatisation of audiology services locally and the threat that GP services in Caversham might be taken over by some remote multinational. What the Government failed to achieve by the front door by an Act of Parliament they are now trying to do through the back door by regulations, which show how worthless were the promises they made to doctors and nurses to try and get them to back off their opposition to the Bill.” (more…)

Mike Farrar, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, told BBC Radio 4 programme that the Secretary of State is right to say the NHS should aspire to be world-class.

“The fact is that you shouldn’t infer that we are not trying. The key thing is how do we make sure that everybody can get to be world-class in every bit of their organisation and hospital. That’s the challenge for us.”

Mr Farrar said a key factor in driving improvement was the publication of data on performance, which he said can spur better outcomes across the service.

“The NHS has failed, I think, in comparing performance in a transparent way. Where we’ve seen the NHS compare its results, that’s been a great catalyst for staff to want to improve. But you do then have to put the resource in to train and educate people how to be the best in the world. It’s not just about aspiration, you’ve got to give them the resources and the wherewithal to be the best in the world.”

Medical Technicians/Administrators are endeavoring to provide a high-quality, cost-efficient service, juggling demands on their time and attention from government regulators, staff, and patients. Hospitals are under unprecedented pressures to improve the health of their patients, improve the quality of care and customer experience, and control rising medical costs.

Infomatrix has developed a healthcare solution in collaboration with Infohealth Solutions, the OneView Medical Device Asset Management (f2), which is a post-modern healthcare solution to managing information needs in the healthcare sector.

The OneView Platform, a multiple data source combined to be displayed in a single view and accessed online as a form of web based reporting, this enables users to upload information and spread sheets to create reports and perform in-depth analyses from multi-dimensional analytics in real time, thus improving the efficiency of any NHS trust.

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Under-fire NHS boss Sir David Nicholson has said he is “absolutely determined” to lead the NHS through the coming health reforms despite calls for him to resign.

Sir David said the NHS is currently at “maximum risk” as the controversial changes are implemented throughout the country. The NHS chief executive said he would stay in his role to see the reforms through. He said that at the moment the NHS is facing its greatest challenge.

Speaking to the Commons Health Select Committee Sir David stated: “In the next few days we will abolish over 160 organisations and we will set up another 211 local organisations and a whole myriad of national ones. We’ll completely change the way in which we allocate resources and incentivise the NHS. At the same time, we have already lost 13,500 administrative and management staff that have all that corporate memory in them. So it is at maximum risk over the next few days. I said two years ago that I would take the responsibility of leading the NHS through this enormously complex set of changes. I promised both the Government and the NHS that I would see that through and I am absolutely determined to do that over the next period.” (more…)

A SHEFFIELD MP spoke out in Parliament to accuse the Government of ‘breaking its promises’ over the privatisation of NHS services.

Paul Blomfield, who represents Sheffield Central, challenged the health secretary Jeremy Hunt to hold a full debate and vote on the Coalition’s new NHS competition regulations.

Last year Mr Hunt said the proposals contained ‘nothing that promotes or permits the transfer of NHS activities to the private sector’.

But, during Health Questions in the House of Commons, Mr Blomfield said: “The new NHS competition regulations break those promises by creating a requirement for almost all commissioning to be carried out through competitive markets, forcing privatisation through the back door, regardless of local will. His refusal to hold a full debate and vote is undemocratic and just goes to show that you cannot trust the Tories on the NHS. Last year Tory ministers promised to keep the NHS public, and now their privatisation plans are being exposed.”

The Government says it has put services out only for ‘competition on quality, not price’. MPs have until March 31 to overturn the planned rules.

The NHS Reform is focused on reducing costs and improving efficiency. Infomatrix has developed a healthcare solution in collaboration with Infohealth Solutions, the OneView Medical Device Asset Management (f2), which is a post-modern healthcare solution to managing information needs in the healthcare sector.

The OneView Platform, a multiple data source combined to be displayed in a single view and accessed online as a form of web based reporting, this enables users to upload information and spread sheets to create reports and perform in-depth analyses from multi-dimensional analytics in real time, thus improving the efficiency of any NHS trust. The new NHS regulations can be viewed here.

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Campaigners have said that recent unchallenged regulations published by the Tory-led government laid bare its plans to privatise the NHS.

Section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act has the effect of dramatically extending competition and forcing “compulsory competitive markets” on the NHS. The regulations require that virtually all commissioning is carried out through competitive markets regardless of what patients want. They also contain legal powers for NHS regulator Monitor to enforce privatisation either independently or at the request of private companies that have lost bids.

Keep Our NHS Public’s Wendy Savage told the Star that the regulations will also tie the health service into EU competition law.

This would cause difficulties for Labour to repeal the Act if it won the next general election as private companies may be able to sue for lost contracts. And Unite fears that cash-strapped NHS providers will struggle to compete with the likes of Virgin Care and Serco in the bidding for contracts, opening up the door for privatisation on a massive scale. (more…)

According to a King’s Fund there are ‘growing worries’ that the quality of NHS care in England will decline further in the coming year due to the ongoing efficiency savings drive. Many feared care could suffer as a result of ‘unprecedented’ financial pressures on the NHS.

One third of 48 NHS finance directors questioned by the King’s Fund said they believed the quality of patient care had worsened over the past year.

More than a third of 58 social service directors polled said they expect to be forced to cut services in the next 12 months, and nearly a fifth anticipated increasing charges to social care users.

The survey formed part of the King’s Fund’s quarterly monitoring report. This also revealed that 24,313 full-time NHS posts were axed between March 2010 and October 2012.

More than 4,000 nurses, midwives and health visitors posts were axed and 8,000 manager positions. Yet, the number of consultants rose by 12% in the same period.

The report said, although most NHS organisations are on track to meet financial targets, pressures are growing towards the end of the second year of the ‘Nicholson Challenge’ to find £20bn in efficiency savings by 2015.

Professor John Appleby, chief economist at the King’s Fund, said: ‘The NHS faces unprecedented financial pressures, and there are growing worries that patient care will suffer. For social care, it will be increasingly difficult for councils to make further savings without directly cutting services or affecting quality. Health and care services have coped well until now, but it is clear that many organisations expect things to become much more difficult over the coming year.’

Rising costs and increased regulation have created exceptional challenges across the NHS and cater the need of an effective healthcare solution. Infomatrix has developed a healthcare solution in collaboration with Infohealth Solutions, the OneView Medical Device Asset Management (f2), which is a post-modern healthcare solution to managing information needs in the healthcare sector.

The OneView Platform, a multiple data source combined to be displayed in a single view and accessed online as a form of web based reporting, this enables users to upload information and spread sheets to create reports and perform in-depth analyses from multi-dimensional analytics in real time.

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