Premature baby left to die alone in sluice room, report reveals: A looming patient safety crisis in the NHS?

By John Tingle

BBC News reported, 24/11/2016 on the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust review of its Royal Oldham and North Manchester General hospitals which identified several ‘unacceptable situations’. The BBC news item states that the review document

“…described how a premature baby had arrived “just before the legal age of viability” – at 22 weeks and six days – but staff did not find “a quiet place” for the child’s mother “to nurse her as she died and instead placed her in a Moses basket and left her in the sluice room to die alone”.

The report goes on to catalogue a number of other shocking events that occurred. Read More

Variability of US State Workplace Wellness Program Laws

A team of researchers led by Jennifer Pomeranz, JD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of the College of Global Public Health at New York University, have released a new set of resources that detail characteristics of laws related to workplace wellness programs and identify trends in these laws across the United States: interactive maps for public and private employers at LawAtlas.org and a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Workplace Wellness Program Laws in US

A few key findings:

  • Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws related to workplace wellness programs.
  • Four states (Georgia, Indiana, Maine and Massachusetts) provide tax incentives for work place wellness programs.
  • State laws addressed public and private employers differently, for example, five states permit rewards (e.g., discounts, rebates and waivers) by public employers, whereas 16 states expressly permit positive rewards for participation in programs by private employers.

The research was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research Program.