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Jeremy Hunt appears to have changed tack in the junior doctors’ dispute if the wording of his lawyers are to be believed. Gone is the spectre of an imposition of the junior doctors’ contract and in is the more conciliatory ‘introduction’ of the junior doctors’ contracts when their current contracts come to an end. There …

Hunt softens approach Read More »

The General Practitioners Committee (GPC) has announced in its manifesto that the number of patients a GP meets daily should be capped. If the doctor reaches the cap then there will be a collection of ‘locality hubs’ who will be able to pick up the excess demand. This manifesto forms part of the wider document …

General Practitioners Committee manifesto seeks daily quota on patients seen per GP Read More »

CQC has called a national review into the ways that NHS trusts learn from deaths, if at all. The review has been called in the wake of the death of a mental health patient who drowned in a bath following an epileptic fit. An inquest into the death of the individual found that neglect had …

Nationwide review into how NHS trusts learn from deaths Read More »

Hull City Council has stated that it wishes to get tough on residential care homes whose standards don’t meet its own high levels. The local authority is largely happy with the standards of care at the services it’s 2,197 residents are housed. However, this hasn’t stopped the authority attempting to drive standards to the highest …

Hull City Council gets tough on residential care Read More »

17 Scottish schools have been forced to close following inspections of the schools which were all built under a public private partnership arrangement. The matter is isolated to a number of schools in the Edinburgh area but as a precautionary measure all schools in Scotland that could be affected have been or will be inspected …

Scottish schools forced to close due to health and safety failings Read More »

The leader of the largest care home operator in the UK has stated that additional funding within the sector will only partially solve the issues that riddle the sector. The care home sector in the UK comprises of 487,000 beds in 18,000 care homes. The largest provider in the UK has over 450 homes with …

UK’s leading care home company states more money alone won’t solve care home crisis Read More »

A former care home boss has suggested that CQC should look into using camera surveillance in the regulation of the care sector. The covert use of cameras could be used to monitor the behaviour of staff and residents in care and assist CQC with targeting their inspections based on need rather than on a predetermined …

Camera surveillance the next step for CQC regulation? Read More »

CQC is set to increase its fees to providers to fully cover the cost of its ‘chargeable activities’. It’s consultation on regulatory fees, which took place between November 2015 and January 2016, set out a number of proposals to increases to fees. It has chosen the most aggressive way of recovering the cost of its …

CQC to increase fees to providers Read More »

The Howard League for Penal Reform has published a report which notes that children’s homes staff are quick to contact the police for matters that would usually be sorted out within a traditional family home settings. Data drawn upon in the report states that some forces are contacted by children’s homes thousands of times over …

Report criticises increasing criminalisation of children in care Read More »

Trusts are being fined by their clinical commissioning groups for missing patient waiting targets. Some will see this as counterproductive as the very reason for missing such targets is often owing to a shortage of available funds to achieve their goals. The fines levied on hospital trusts total £600m, some 90% of which are expected …

Trusts fined £600m for missing patient targets Read More »