About backroom deals & new chapters
More from the Public Accounts Committee on that deal with Dr Foster.
Edward Leigh, MP, the chairman of the committee, said: “By pursuing its backroom deal with Dr Foster LLP, the Department of Health failed in its duty to be open to Parliament and the taxpayer.
“There was no fair and competitive tendering competition, as laid down in public sector procurement guidelines. And Treasury guidance on joint ventures between public and private sectors was ignored. Instead, the deal was handed to Dr Foster on a plate.
In addition the costs of KPMG, the consultants who advised the Information Centre on the deal, rapidly escalated from a figure initially estimated and contracted for £284,000 to between £1.75m and £2.5m, an extremely high figure on a relatively straightforward £12m deal.
Nice work!
And we are told that targets are to be “slashed”. Now just how believable is that? I wonder if this new chapter will be worth mentioning in a few months.
Improvements in services need significant initial investment before we get to high quality self-care for diabetics or other chronic conditions.
Besides which people accord a low priority to strokes based on their perceptions of what can be done to treat them. So increased urgency in treatment will translate to earlier presentations. After all, heart attacks used to be managed at home not so many years ago.
The Stroke Association poll of 2,000 people suggests 88% would react immediately if they lost a bank card.
This compared with 34% of people it suggested would wait 24 hours if they experienced facial or arm weakness and speech problems - symptoms of a stroke.
Just 33% of those polled were aware a stroke caused immediate brain damage. Experts say the findings are worrying.
Patients turning up at A&E to find very little done for them are unlikely to follow the well-meaning advice on TV.
Soothing words that have been betrayed flagrantly this year already with the MTAS recruitment crisis, which has scalped thousands of highly trained men & women.
Alarmed at so many posts being vacant on August 1, the Department of Health gives trusts two weeks to manage what the hugely expensive national competition failed to achieve in six months. Before August, trusts are ordered to find somewhere to shuffle 10,000 doctors for three months until the current crisis is past, and these doctors can then be quietly lost from the NHS for ever.
Maybe they should move into this field as interest in it seems to be growing.
Ten years ago a similar project provided telemedical care to the remote reaches of the Andaman & Nicobar islands from a hospital in Chennai, India. And it was a similar project aimed at providing support to A&E departments out of hours that was my first independent large-scale foray into medical informatics in this country. I’m glad to see that it is still of interest to some folks.