And statistics
Dr Foster and the CQC have both come under fire for how they rate hospitals. Daloni Carlisle reports.
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NHS needs better trained prescribers
Doctors are to be formally tested on their knowledge of medicines before they graduate, it has been announced. The British Pharmacological Society (BPS) says that prescribing is the core business of the NHS, but skill levels have lagged for too long and known problems have not been addressed. The Society says current training in prescribing […]
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DH mandates incident reporting
The Department of Health has confirmed that it will end the voluntary system for reporting patient safety incidents to the National Patient Safety Agency. Instead, it will make it mandatory for all NHS trusts in England, including hospitals, primary care trusts, mental health services and ambulance services to report instances of harm or death to […]
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Dr Foster names safety underperformers
The Dr Foster Hospital Guide 2009 has named 12 NHS trusts that it says have significantly underperformed on its new measure of patient safety. The guide, published over the weekend, identifies patient safety as the single most important element of hospital care. For the first time, it has introduced a Patient Safety Score, awarding scores of one to […]
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Expert view: Andy Bratt
Discharge summary target ‘to be missed’
The vast majority of NHS hospitals look set to miss the government’s target for delivering discharge summaries to GP practices within 24 hours from next April.
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UnitedHealth buys ScriptSwitch for £50m
ScriptSwitch, the provider of drug comparison software to doctors’ surgeries, has been acquired by UnitedHealth UK, for a reported sum of £50m.
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Barcoded wristbands compulsory by 2011
The Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care has called for patients to wear barcoded wristbands and for trusts that do not comply by July 2011 to be penalised. An advanced notification of a new information standard has been sent out by the ISB that would define the procedures necessary to add barcodes to patient wristbands […]
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It’s cold out there
Malcolm Newbury of IHE UK says it’s time to break out of Groundhog Day and find a new way of doing interoperability in the post NPfIT world.
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Third of trusts miss wristband deadline
The National Patient Safety Agency has admitted that almost a third of NHS acute trusts in England and Wales have failed to meet the requirement to generate and print standardised patient wristbands. The NPSA has issued statistics to E-Health Insider that show that more than three months after the deadline passed in July, only 70% of NHS […]
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