IT for a change
So today is the day that maternity report comes out & there are more dissenting voices.
Home births were at least twice as likely to result in foetal death as hospital births, even for women considered at low risk, said James Drife, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Leeds General Infirmary.
“I don’t think the Government is being realistic about what can be achieved or entirely honest about the risks,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Prof Drife, a former vice-president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said it was “very doubtful” that the Government’s promise could be achieved because of the midwife shortage. Home births required two midwives to be present and it was hard enough to achieve one-to-one care in a hospital, he said.
Jim Thornton, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Nottingham, said: “It is wasteful proposal. Giving birth at home is a minority preference and relatively expensive in terms of midwives’ time.
Even advocates of home birth turned on the Government, saying there were simply not enough midwives to do the job.
Dr Sheila Kitzinger, Britain’s leading expert on childbirth, said the Government was being “deceitful”. She added: “This plan is just spin. It cannot be done.”
Yes, but people seem to forgetting all those maternity support workers who will be covering the shortfall.
The Lib Dems quantify the losses incurred as a result of the dental contract at 55 million pounds.
Some 78% of respondents reported a shortage in revenue from patient charges.
The shortfall amounted to £55,658,754 among the 86 trusts that responded to the survey. Another 66 PCTs did not provide figures.
Geriatric care which is often neglected gets a mention in the Times. After all it is not as high profile as things like cancer. People forget that there are going to be an awful lot more of the elderly around.
“Nursing home care is moving towards residential home care, and residential home care is moving towards domiciliary home care.â€
The National Screening programme for cancer has a few concerns about its own role.
Julietta Patnick, head of the national screening programme, said: “When a postmortem is done on a man in his 80s most of the time he will have prostate cancer. These men are dying of other causes, they’ve never been diagnosed before. Prostate is an extreme example but it follows to a lesser extent for other cancers.”
I’m not sure that I agree. Prostate cancer causes a lot of morbidity & gets a lot less attention than breast or cervical cancer. Until we can predict individualised odds for survival, it is hard to see how one can be tested for while the other isn’t.
That report on radiotherapy waits gets more press time in the Telegraph.
More than half of all cancer patients are having to wait longer than the Government says is acceptable for life-saving radiotherapy treatment, it was disclosed last night.
There is also a huge disparity in the provision of radiotherapy services across the country, with “black holes” where treatment is very poor, a report by an NHS advisory group is said to show.
The study, by the National Radiotherapy Advisory Group, is being looked at by ministers, but it has not yet been published. It has reportedly found that half of all cancer patients are waiting longer than the Government’s “maximum acceptable delay” of four weeks for the treatment.
Last night, a Department of Health spokesman refused to discuss the report’s contents. He said the report was with ministers and no decision had been taken on publishing it.
Really? You think problems will go away if you refuse to acknowledge them? It appears that this approach is shared by the folks below.
Cerner Millennium isn’t getting a good press from the hospitals to have had it installed. Milton Keynes General Hospital went live for the PAS option a few weeks ago but is already in the news following a letter from the staff.
the software is “awkward and clunkyâ€. “In our opinion, the system should not be installed in any further hospitals.â€
Reported problems include clinics not being available, patient notes being lost or unavailable, staff being trained on a different system to the one implemented and problems with reporting around key areas such as 18-week waits. One senior clinician from the trust described the situation in outpatients as “a nightmare”.
And Computer Weekly says that CfH tried to suppress the BCS report into the NPfIT which says that
the “value for money from services deployed is poor”, that political pressure has caused health officials to “deny problems and to defend the indefensible”, and that implementation plans have frequently ranged from the “optimistic to the unreal”.
The report’s author, Ian Herbert, who is vice-chairman of the BCS Health Informatics Forum, told last month’s HC2007 Healthcare IT conference that Connecting for Health chief executive Richard Granger, after seeing a draft, did not want the report published.
“It was an interesting process developing that report. Richard Granger was not keen that we publish it, he was keen that we did something else rather more opaquely behind closed doors. We were not prepared to do that. We owed more to our members. So we produced the report,” said Herbert.
When your foundations are wonky, it is hard to get the superstructure right, that is if you even try.
An opinion that the Ferret Fancier apparently shares as he keeps up the pressure on PMETB. And this non-apology isn’t good enough.