Category: John Tingle

Child safeguarding: the National Health Service (NHS) can do much better

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By John Tingle

Our children are our future and we need to look after them well. There is however a lot of evidence to suggest that we are failing our children in a number of key health areas. UNICEF in a report put the UK in 16th position – below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal – in a league table of child well-being in the world’s richest countries. The report considers five dimensions of children’s lives – material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment – as well as children’s subjective well-being.

There are a number of health and other child well-being challenges for the UK to meet. The UNICEF report provides some useful context from which to view the recently published Care Quality Commission (CQC) report on the arrangements for child safeguarding and healthcare for looked after children in England.The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.Whilst the report does contain some positive findings, when read as a whole, these seem subsumed by the large number of negative findings, some of which are very worrying. Read More

Learning from mistakes in the NHS: a special report by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) into how the NHS failed to investigate properly the death of a three-year-old child.

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By John Tingle

In the UK where health is concerned money is a particularly poor compensator for the loss of a limb, faculty or even a family member. In my experience patients who have suffered adverse health incidents, negligence, more often than not, are not primarily motivated by obtaining monetary compensation. They seek in the main an explanation of what occurred and why, an apology and an assurance that what happened will not happen to anybody else; that lessons have been learned.

The NHS (National Health Service) for decades has been unable to provide a satisfactory complaints and patient adverse incident investigation service which provides these outcomes generally. More often than not patients have to resort to complaining or beginning litigation in order to find out what happened and why and the process that they have to embark on can alienate them even more as they soon hit major and seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. The NHS maintains a defensive and blame ridden culture when errors happen as the terrible events of Mid Staffordshire revealed.

The report Read More

The vexed problem of properly discharging elderly patients from hospital back into the community

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By John Tingle

The National Health Service (NHS) just does not seem to be able to deal properly with discharging elderly patients from hospital back into the community. There have been major issues in this area going back decades. Stories in the media and official reports regularly appear about ‘bed blocking’ by elderly patients or hospitals discharging them back into the community without proper care arrangements being made.

There is a real fear that the NHS will never be able to turn things around here and that the lessons of the past are not being learnt .There are seemingly intractable problems being faced by trusts, social services and others in doing a proper job with elderly patient discharge.The high financial cost to the NHS of keeping well elderly patients in hospital has also been widely discussed.

Hospitals and social services have faced a barrage of criticism of failing to have coordinated care policies and arrangements leading in some cases to deaths of patients.
Two reports have been published recently which show that patient safety is being seriously compromised in this area. Read More

Brexit: I woke up this morning and the world had changed

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By John Tingle

I voted in the referendum yesterday along with many others. The referendum turnout was 71.8%, with more than 30 million people voting. It was the highest turnout in a UK-wide vote since the 1992 general election.

My area, Broxtowe in Nottingham where I live, voted to leave the EU, 54.6%, 35754 votes, remain 45.4% 29672 votes. I live in the East Midlands, Middle England. Deep regional divisions have been laid bare by this referendum. It was notable that London largely voted to stay in the EU whereas in my region there was a notable push to leave, 58.5%.The  referendum result shows British politics has, according to the Guardian newspaper, fractured beyond all recognition since the last referendum on Europe in 1975.

The issues around EU membership have been hotly debated and there was a high level of public interest in what went on. Immigration has been the dominant theme in many areas and health along with a number of other issues has also come up. At this moment we are in a post referendum, after shock stage and picking through the fallout to see what is happening and what is going to happen. People are happy, sad and anxious over the result.It was not that long after the vote was announced by the BBC that our Prime Minister David Cameron said he was going to stand down in October, that was a lot to take in so soon after the result. Looking at some of the posts on Facebook it is striking how many young people feel a sense of betrayal by the vote to leave the EU. Many seem to harbour a deep sense of resentment that they have been robbed of a future by an elder generation, it’s the baby boomers against the millennials. Read More

General Medical Practice: Complaint Handling Issues

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By John Tingle

There is a new report from Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) on GP (General Medical Practitioner) complaint handling and major failings are revealed. The HSO makes the final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved in England and lies at the apex of the NHS complaints system. The report reveals that some GP practices are failing to handle patient complaints properly. The report is based on evidence from HSO casework files and intelligence gathered by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) , NHS England and Healthwatch England. One hundred and thirty-seven closed complaint cases from November 2014 – November 2015 were analysed. General medical practice forms 90% of all NHS interactions with the general public.The quality of complaint handling by GPs was found to be highly variable:

“…over half of the cases were either good (46%) or outstanding (9%). However, over a third required improvement (36%) and a tenth were inadequate (10%) (p7).”

The report states that there are five areas where general practice has the most scope for improvement: Read More

Healthcare complaints matter: the need to improve the system

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By John Tingle

Today consumerism is an essential part of the fabric of British society and complaint systems are heralded in many retail and professional environments. The British public have got used to complaining over the years and this attitude has seeped into the provision of health care services.

Records levels of complaints about the National Health Service (NHS) can be seen to be made every year but the NHS just does not seem to be able to get to grips with developing a good patient complaints handling system.

The Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) lies at the top of the NHS complaints structure and makes the final decisions on complaints that have not be resolved by the NHS in England. The HSO has looked into the quality of NHS complaint investigations where serious or avoidable harm has been alleged.Systemic failings in complaint, patient safety investigations were revealed. Failures which unsurprisingly have appeared in numerous complaints reports over the years before.

For the report, the HSO reviewed 150 NHS complaint investigations where avoidable harm or death was alleged. The HSO also spoke to six different trusts and surveyed over 170 NHS complaint managers to gain insights. An advisory group was later convened by the HSO to test findings.

Read More

Looking Towards 2030 in Patient Safety

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By John Tingle

There is a clear need for those charged with patient safety policy making to prepare for the future and to take account of emerging trends. This would be so in any commercial or professional organisation. These issues were addressed in the context of patient safety at the recent,Patient Safety Global Action Summit held in March 2016 in London. The conference was designed to mirror the discussions contained in the report  by NIHR (National Institute for Health Research), Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at Imperial College London and The Imperial College NHS Trust on the priorities and direction that the patient safety movement should follow going towards 2030.

There is a lot that is excellent in this report  which is very rich in analysis and detail. Lots of deep thinking about patient safety issues with interesting and novel ideas expressed on nearly every page.

Emerging threats to patient safety

In the report, in chapter one, it is acknowledged that there are many existing issues at the root of patient harm that have yet to be solved. Also that unfortunately trends in healthcare are likely to increase the risks to safety. The report focuses on four emerging trends: Read More

Intelligent Transparency and Patient Safety: New UK Government Patient Safety Plans Launched

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By John Tingle

One thing is clear when commentating on patient safety developments in the UK is that there is hardly ever a dull moment or a lapse of activity in patient safety policy development .Something always appears to be happening somewhere and it’s generally a very significant something. Things are happening at a pace with patient safety here.

On the 3rd March 2016 the Secretary of State for Health,The Rt Honourable Jeremy Hunt announced a major change to the patient safety infrastructure in the NHS with the setting  up from the 1st April 2016 of the independent Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch. In a speech in London to the Global Patient Safety Summit on improving standards in healthcare he also reflected on current patient safety initiatives.This new organisation has been modelled on the Air Accident Investigation Branch which has operated successfully in the airline industry. It will undertake, ‘timely, no-blame investigations’.

The Aviation and Health Industries
The airline industry has provided some very useful thinking in patient safety policy development when the literature on patient safety in the UK is considered. The way the airline industry changed its culture regarding accidents is mentioned by the Secretary of State in glowing terms. Pilots attending training programmes with engineers and flight attendants discussing communications and teamwork. There was a dramatic and immediate reduction in aviation fatalities which he wants to see happening now in the NHS. Read More

Patient safety perspectives from other countries: introducing the WHO Geneva safe childbirth checklist

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By John Tingle

Healthcare providers and policy makers can avoid the expense of reinventing the wheel if they try and look beyond their shores for solutions to patient safety problems. In the UK the work of the patient safety unit of WHO in Geneva helps NHS healthcare providers through the development of patient safety tools and other projects. The  WHO multi-professional patient safety curriculum guide is one example. The learning from error – video and booklet is another. Recently launched by WHO is the Safe Childbirth checklist and guide to implementation.

The Checklist will be a useful patient safety tool in developing, transitioning and developed countries. The scale of the problem is very disturbing. WHO calculate that in 2013, 289,000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth, and 2.8 million new-borns died within 28 days of birth. Most of these events could have been prevented and mostly occurred in low resource settings. Women and their babies are being very conspicuously failed by health systems which should be helping them. Read More

Minnesota: Leading The Way In Patient Safety

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By John Tingle

The UK Government and the Department of Health are taking patient safety very seriously and, since the publication of ‘An organisation with a memory’ in 2000, the UK has like the USA been a world leader in the field of patient safety policies, practices and developments.

In the UK we have a very sophisticated patient NHS (National Health Service) patient safety infrastructure and system along with a NHS Adverse incident reporting system, the NRLS (National Reporting and Learning System). Despite having such a ‘Rolls Royce’, well-established patient safety infrastructure and system, terrible patient safety incidents such as that which happened in Mid Staffordshire a few years ago seem to plague the NHS. Patients died because of poor care and, according to the report, “[t]he Inquiry identifies a story of terrible and unnecessary suffering of hundreds of people who were failed by a system which ignored the warning signs of poor care and put corporate self-interest and cost control ahead of patients and their safety.”Our patient system missed the terrible care failings identified in this inquiry report. We are working hard on improving the system and my posts will provide regular updates on what is happening in the UK, Europe and beyond in patient safety.

Patient Safety: A World Problem Read More