Happy Birthday to our National Health Service (NHS)

By John Tingle

Our National Health Service turns 70 in July and has made remarkable achievements since its inception on July 5, 1948. The NHS is quite rightly an institution to be proud of, and it is envied across the world. Admittedly, the NHS does have its problems, but these should not detract from an overall appreciation of its core value to our society.

In 70 years a lot has happened. Nursing and medicine have evolved, new treatments, and medicines have been developed to cope with new diseases, and our concept of health has also changed.

Health is no longer just the absence of disease; it’s a far more holistic concept today.

Since its inception, the NHS has had to deal with clinical negligence claims. Today there is mounting concern that the high level and costs of clinical negligence claims threaten the very existence and fabric of the NHS.

Exactly what must be done to reduce levels and costs remains a topic of intense speculation and conjecture.

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Patient Safety, Health Quality and Learning Disability

By John Tingle

Tragic stories of mental health care failings leading to injury and in some cases death have featured strongly in the English media in recent years. The reports reveal common threads such as poor resources, inadequate staffing levels, limited service availability, poor inter-agency cooperation, poor patient engagement, poor understanding of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and so on. This care area seems to largely remain a Cinderella health care service provision, existing in the shadows, with the focus being predominantly on physical acute care. There are however now welcome and firm Government commitments to drive improvement into mental health care supported by a raft of promising initiatives.

When patient stories of learning disability and autism care failings are read from several reference sources a picture emerges. Care for people with learning disability and autism can be seen to share many of the patient safety and health quality problems that beset patients who are classified as being mentally ill: Read More

Patient Safety Failings in Independent Acute Hospitals in England

By John Tingle

One thing that strikes the UK visitor to the USA is the vast array of  large public and private hospitals that exist with many having trauma and emergency rooms. Private hospitals don’t exist on this scale in the UK. Our major hospitals are public, state run NHS (National Health Service) hospitals. Independent, private acute hospitals are generally small in size, have no emergency rooms and maintain a bespoke health care provision. The focus is on patients with a single condition and routine elective surgery. The myriad number of complex multiple conditions, dementia etc that the NHS regularly face as a norm are not covered in the independent sector here with such cases being screened out. This limited focus on the type of care provided does mean that staff within independent acute hospitals have a sheltered and more controlled work remit and environment. This is a significant patient safety issue.

The Independent Health and Social Care Regulator of England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have recently published their findings of independent acute hospital inspections. They inspected and rated 206 independent acute hospitals and the majority were assessed as providing high quality care. At 2nd January 2018, 62% were rated as good,16 (8%) as outstanding. The report contains some very positive findings on health care provision in these hospitals but also some major governance and patient safety failings were found which are very concerning.

The Independent Newspaper reported back in 2015 reported that private hospitals ‘lack facilities to deal with emergencies’, and quoted a study that found that between 2010 and 2014, 800 patients, including those referred by the NHS, died unexpectedly in private hospitals. Read More

The Health Service Ombudsman: NHS Failing Patients with Mental Health Problems

By John Tingle

Failings in National Health Service (NHS) care for patients with mental health problems is a worryingly persistent story in the English media. Many reports show harrowing and dramatic failings in NHS care provision for the mentally ill some of which result in avoidable deaths.The Health Service Ombudsman  (HSO) represents the final stage in the NHS complaints procedure and is an independent  office reporting  directly  to Parliament.The HSO carry’s out investigations into complaints  and makes the final decisions on those that have not been resolved by the NHS in England.In a recently published report the HSO reveals reveals unjust, shocking and tragic failings  in NHS care provision for patients with mental health problems.Some mental health care complaints figures are given in the report.In 2016-2017 there were 14,106 complaints made to NHS mental health trusts (hospitals) with ,65% being upheld or partly upheld by the local organisation.Case work data between 2014-15 and 2017-18 was analysed and five key themes showing persistent failings that the HSO see in complaints being made emerged from this exercise:

  • Diagnosis and failure to treat.
  • Risk assessment and safety
  • Dignity and human rights.
  • Communication.
  •  Inappropriate discharge and provision of aftercare.

The HSO also points out in the report that the other common factor in the cases examined is too frequent substandard complaint handling by the NHS organisation. This adds insult to injury, compounding the impact of failings. Read More

Taking action to prevent male suicide

By John Tingle

The issue of male suicide and prevention seems to have been an obscured or perhaps even a forgotten issue in reports discussing the care of vulnerable people. The UK media have recently focussed on this issue with the Project Eighty-Four campaign. This campaign  aims to raise awareness of male suicide with sculptures being placed on the top of a London tower block to mark this. The sculptures are on the top of ITV’s (Independent Television ) Buildings on London’s Southbank Promenade from 26th March 2018.The sculptures are designed to get people talking about the issue. Friends and families of the deceased men helped create them: “Each one, a poignant reminder of a real life lost and a call to society to come together and ultimately take a stand against male suicide.

BBC News has also covered the event. Project Eighty Four states that the statistics on male suicide are shocking. Every two hours a man in the UK takes his own life. Project Eighty Four is an initiative of the charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably).CALM is dedicated to preventing male suicide and they say that male suicide and mental health is a big issue that cannot be ignored for any longer.

Interestingly they report in latest annual report and accounts a modest but noticeable increase in the number of female callers for help and advice. CALM’s focus is on men because of the high rate of male suicides.Helpline workers helped to directly prevent 409 suicides in 2016-17, up 19% on the previous year. Read More

Improving Mental Health Care in the NHS

By John Tingle

The Guardian newspaper recently published it’s investigation into Coroners Prevention of Future Deaths Notices (PFDN’s) issued between 2012-2017 involving people receiving NHS care for mental health conditions. The findings from its investigation are shocking; many cases deaths could have been prevented had better care been given. Some errors identified are classic patient safety errors and these included:

  • Poor communication between agencies and/or staff, non-observation of protocols or policies (or lack of protocols or policies.
  • Lack of appropriate care or continuity of care.
  • Poor record keeping, poor communications with the patient or his or her family.
  • Insufficient risk assessment  and delays.

The investigation revealed 45 cases reported by the coroner where patients were discharged too soon or without adequate support. Seventy-two instances of poor or inappropriate care, 41 cases where treatment was delayed.

Children and young people’s mental health
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the the independent regulator of health and social care in England and they have recently reviewed children and young people’s mental health services and have found significant systems failures which could well put children and young people at risk of harm. Mental health problems are the report states, quite common in children and young people with estimates suggesting around 1 in 10 being affected.

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Failings in care for patients being treated under the Mental Health Act 1983

By John Tingle

The Care Quality Commission (CQC)  is the independent regulator of health and social care in England and they have recently produced their annual report to Parliament on how health services are applying the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) .This report, shines a very strong light on failing health care practices in mental health care relating to the  MHA. Shocking failures are revealed and the errors are compounded by the fact that the poor practices have been identified in previous reports and are long standing in nature.

The CQC state that national data from the last 25 years shows an increasing use of the MHA to treat people in hospitals. From 2005/06 to 2015/16, the reported number of uses of the MHA to detain people in hospital increased by 40%. There was a 9% increase from 2014/15 to 2015/16 rising to 63,622 uses of the MHA. The CQC can find no single cause for the increases in detention rates over the last 10 years.

The CQC once again draw attention to the persistent theme present in its previous reports of black and minority ethnic over representation figures in the use of the MHA.

The CQC found that there are still services that continue to fail in their legal duties to give patients information about their rights, verbally and in writing as soon as possible after their detention or community treatment order commences. They found no evidence that staff had discussed rights with the patient on admission in 11 % (378) of patient records that they checked. In a further inspection of 9%, (286) of records, no evidence could be found to say that patients received the information in an accessible format.

Consent to treatment

The CQC state that they have concerns about whether the patient consents, refuses consent or is incapable of consent. They expect to see capacity assessments to support views and possibly evidence that staff have considered ways in which they could help the patient gain or regain capacity. They have frequently raised concerns over whether clinicians have recorded evidence of their conversations with patients who are detained over their proposed treatment and their views. Read More

Learning the lessons from patient safety errors of the past

By John Tingle

A common theme found in patient safety reports in England going back as far as the year 2000 is that the NHS (National Health Service) is poor at learning lessons from previous adverse health incident reports and of changing practice. The seminal report on patient safety in England, Organisation with a memory in 2000  stated:

“There is no single focal point for NHS information on adverse events, and at present it is spread across nearly 1,000 different organisations. The NHS record in implementing the recommendations that emerge from these various systems is patchy. Too often lessons are identified but true ‘active’ learning does not take place because the necessary changes are not properly embedded in practice.” (x-xi).

In late 2003 our NRLS (National Reporting and Learning System) was established.This is our central database of patient safety incident reporting. Can we say today that the NHS is actively learning from the adverse patient safety incidents of the past and changing practice? That the NRLS has been a great success? Or is the jury still out on these questions? Unfortunately the jury is still out. Sadly, there is no shortage of contemporary reports saying that the NHS still needs to improve its lesson learning capacity from adverse events.

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The cat is now truly amongst the pigeons in the debate about the high cost of clinical negligence in the NHS

By John Tingle

UK national and social media have been buzzing all last week about a letter sent on Monday 29th January 2018 by the NHS Confederation to the Justice Secretary and copying in the Secretary of State for Health.BBC  news set the scene under the banner headline, ‘Curb rising NHS negligence pay-outs, health leaders urge’.

The NHS Confederation is a charity and membership body that brings together and speaks on behalf of all organisations that plan, commission and provide NHS services. Members are drawn from every part of the health and care system. The letter coordinated by them had several co-signatories in the medical establishment including the Chief Executives of the doctor’s defence organisations, the British Medical Association (BMA), The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. The letter said that the current level of NHS compensation pay-outs is unsustainable and is diverting significant amounts of funding away from front line care services. Last year the NHS spent £1.7 billion on clinical negligence claims, representing 1.5 % of front line health services spending. This annual cost has almost doubled since 2010/11 with an average 11.5 % increase every year:

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The New NHS Never Events Policy and Framework

By John Tingle

In tort law we have a very well-known Latin phrase, ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’ (the thing speaks for itself). An inference of negligence can be raised by the events that occurred. In the National Health Service (NHS) in England there is a similar concept,‘the Never Event’. The Never Event concept is a USA import into the NHS and was introduced  from April 2009. The list of what is to be regarded as a Never Event has been revised over the years in the NHS and is currently set out by NHS Improvement.

Never events include, wrong site surgery, wrong implant/prosthesis, retained foreign object post procedure, mis-selection of a strong potassium solution, administration of medication by the wrong route and so on. Never Events are defined in NHS policy documentation as:

“…patient safety incidents that are wholly preventable where guidance or safety recommendations that provide strong systemic protective barriers are available at a national level and have been implemented by healthcare providers.  Each Never Event type has the potential to cause serious patient harm or death. However, serious harm or death does not need to have happened as a result of a specific incident for that incident to be categorised as a Never Event.” (p.6) Read More