Yesterday saw The Times reporting plans for a new Child Protection Information System, which aims to link up and log data on all children’s visits to A&E or an out of hours (OOH) GP with social services’ at-risk registers. (Log-in required, both for the Times story, and hopefully for the new system as well.) The Department of Health confirmed the story, which has also been followed up by the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, Sun, Independent and EHI (via my NHS news and comment feed @ImpatientNHS). Continue reading “Child Protection Information System could work, but it won’t be easy”
Category: Hospitals
Where are the NHS jobs: the biggest NHS employers mapped
Everyone in England needs healthcare, so you might imagine that NHS jobs would be fairly evenly distributed based on population.* That isn’t quite the case, as this interactive map, using data from the NHS Information Centre on the largest English NHS employers and each region, shows. Continue reading “Where are the NHS jobs: the biggest NHS employers mapped”
Why London is the home of loss-making NHS hospital trusts
A decreasing number of NHS hospitals are run by plain old NHS trusts, simply because an increasing number are successfully applying to be foundation trusts – which requires evidence of financial stability. Those which have not yet become foundations are regulated by the Audit Commission, which therefore tends to oversee those on a weaker financial footing. It recently reported on the trusts still in its care, and found that 10 of the non-foundations were in financial deficit in 2011-12, totalling £177m. (Trusts have a legal duty not to make a loss, although this applies over three-year periods.) Continue reading “Why London is the home of loss-making NHS hospital trusts”
Hartlepool shows how pension funds could save NHS hospitals from PFI
A new NHS hospital typically costs hundreds of millions of pounds to build. Trusts do what anyone buying a new home does: they take out a mortgage. The problem has been that most trusts (in England, anyway) have had only one, weird type of mortgage available: a private finance initiative (PFI). Continue reading “Hartlepool shows how pension funds could save NHS hospitals from PFI”
Open source test results service adopted by renal patients
UK-wide online system letting patients see results within hours of a test may be used by other specialities
This is an unusual example of a system built by a couple of NHS organisations in one nation – health boards in Scotland in this case – which is then adopted by units across the UK. Continue reading “Open source test results service adopted by renal patients”