Tag: recent publications

Empty hospital bed.

The Inevitability of Error in Health Care

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

A recent publication by the World Health Organization (WHO), a first draft of a global patient safety action plan 2021-2030, seems to have rekindled conversations about the “inevitability of error” in the field of patient safety.

The “inevitability of error” argument indicates that mistakes in health care do inevitably happen; that they are the consequences of the complex nature of health care treatment. Nursing and medicine depend on people, and nobody is infallible — we all make mistakes.

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an ambulance parked at the entrance of an emergency department

Patient Safety and Health Quality in the NHS (National Health Service) in England: A Zip Code Lottery?

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By John Tingle

The independent regulator of health and social care in England, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) regularly produces detailed inspection reports on the health and care organisations that it regulates. These reports show that quality of care and patient safety are not consistent across England’s health and care facilities. Wide variations in quality and safety between core services in the same NHS hospital or in the same locality as well as regionally are sometimes revealed. It is clear from reading the reports that patient safety and health quality cannot be a measured as a constant across England.

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An index finger rests on one yellow star while four other stars are shaded to the right, indicating a one star review.

Improving the Mindset on NHS Complaint Handling

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

History has not served the NHS (National Health Service) complaints system well

History has not served the NHS complaints system well. There have been many reports about NHS complaints going back well over two and a half decades, saying the same or similar things about the system. Many have argued and continue to argue that the NHS complaints system needs to be much more responsive, simpler in operation and less defensive. It is fair comment to argue today that the NHS complaints system is still plagued with endemic and systemic problems. The NHS has never been able to gets its health care complaints system right.

Two contemporary reports, one published in 2018 and the other in 2020, give support to the view that the NHS needs to do much more to improve how patient complaints are handled. Read More

Hand placing wood toy block on top of a tower. The blocks all have images of medical-related items on them, like pills, stethoscope, syringe

Lost in the Jungle of Patient Safety Reports, Publications and Initiatives?

John Tingle Leave a comment

By John Tingle

In terms of the progress of developing a patient safety culture in the National Health Service (NHS) in England, the Daily Telegraph reports comments made by Professor Ted Baker, the Chief Inspector of Hospitals at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) at a recent conference in London. He held the view that “little progress” has been made improving patient safety in the NHS in 20 years, and that never events such as wrong site surgery were still happening because the overall culture is one of defensiveness. The Telegraph reported, “He told The Patient Safety Learning conference that hospital managers routinely hide evidence from the CQC, because they regard the organisation as out to blame them.”

The Telegraph also mentions an NHS estimate in July that 11,000 patients a year may be dying as a result of blunders, partly as a result of a “blame game” culture between staff.

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Back view of a little boy wearing a backpack walking to school

Zeroing In on “Zero Tolerance” School Discipline Laws

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research 1 Comment

By Alexandra Hess

Exclusionary school discipline (ESD) policies, also known as Zero Tolerance policies, enforce disciplinary measures like suspension, expulsion, or law enforcement referral to address particular student behaviors.

Though it began as part of the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, which mandated one-year expulsion for possessing a firearm at school, ESD became more widely adopted over time. Now, the policies apply nationwide to a broad range of behaviors — from damaging property and fighting, to possessing a cell phone or tobacco, as well as behaviors described by subjective terms often undefined in the law, like willful defiance, obscenity, or profanity. Read More

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Suicide Prevention and Patient Safety

John Tingle Leave a comment

Suicide prevention needs to be taken more seriously globally by governments, health systems as an urgent public health concern.

WHO (World Health Organisation) states that close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which translates to one person dying every 40 seconds. For each adult who died by suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds globally, and occurs throughout the lifespan. Read More

Opportunities and challenges for user-generated licensing models in gene-editing

Timo Minssen Leave a comment

By Timo Minssen,  Esther van Zimmeren & Jakob Wested 

An earlier version of this contribution had been published in Life Science Intellectual Property Review (LSIPR).

A voluntary pool or clearinghouse model may give rise to a robust commercial ecosystem for CRISPR and could include special provisions for royalty-free research use by academics. Hence, there may be a path through the CRISPR patent jungle. But, there are many obstacles still in the way.

The revocation of Broad Institute’s patent EP2771468 reported and discussed here, marks the latest major development in a series of patent battles over the revolutionary and highly lucrative CRISPR-Cas9 technology (and other gene editing technologies) in the US and Europe.

While this is the first EPO decision in an opposition procedure concerning the Broad patent portfolio, the outcome may have implications for other related patents as the rationale for the revocation reflects a larger, systemic challenge based on the different rules regarding priority claims in different jurisdictions.

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Massachusetts Wants To Drive Down Medicaid Drug Costs: Why Is The Administration So Nervous?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Nicholas Bagley and Rachel Sachs appears on the Health Affairs Blog. 

Although drug formularies are ubiquitous in Medicare and the private insurance market, they’re absent in Medicaid. By law, state Medicaid programs that offer prescription drug coverage (as they all do) must cover all drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however expensive they are and however slim their clinical benefits may be.

Massachusetts would like to change all that. In a recent waiver proposal, Massachusetts asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to allow it to adopt a closed formulary in Medicaid. That would allow Massachusetts to exclude certain brand-name drugs from Medicaid, increasing its leverage in price negotiations beyond what it can achieve through existing utilization management techniques like prior authorization.

Among Medicaid advocates, the proposal is controversial. Some fear that state budgets would be balanced on the backs of Medicaid beneficiaries, who could be denied access to expensive therapies. But Massachusetts thinks there’s room to drive down drug spending without threatening access to needed medications. In any event, the state has to do something. Drug spending in Massachusetts has increased, on average, 13 percent annually since 2010, threatening to “crowd out important spending on health care and other critical programs.”

By all rights, CMS should welcome Massachusetts’s proposal. Closed drug formularies are tried-and-true, market-based approaches to fostering competition over drug prices, and the Trump administration’s Council on Economic Advisers recently released a report saying that “government policy should induce price competition” in Medicaid. If Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar means it when he says that “drug prices are too high,” letting Massachusetts try out a formulary makes a ton of sense. […]

 Read the Full post here!