The HFEA confirmed that figures showing the clinic had the highest success rate in the UK for babies born through fertility treatment were correct and added that it did not intend to criticise Mr Taranissi’s clinical standards, treatment or patient care.
The HFEA had also carried out raids on Mr Taranissi’s clinics - the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre (ARGC) and Reproductive Genetics Institute (RGI).
In June, the High Court ruled the searches were “unlawful”.
I suspect that the BBC are going to have to pay out a substantial sum.
Indian doctors on HSMP visas wishing to train or work in Britain won a major court ruling in their favour Friday after judges decided employers will now have to treat them on par with doctors from Europe.
The court case revolved around a challenge to a health ministry guidance that would have compelled prospective employers - such as hospitals - to discriminate against non-European candidates, first by establishing that their skills were not found in Europe and then, if selected, to apply for work permits for them.
However, in a unanimous ruling, three judges of the Appeals Court called the ministry guidance “illegal”, sparking instant celebrations among campaigners of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (BAPIO) on Diwali day.
Anthony Robinson, a solicitor for BAPIO said: “As is widely acknowledged, the NHS has for many years relied upon the contribution of doctors from overseas, and in particular the Indian sub-continent, in order to provide a quality service in times of shortage of British doctors.
“Now that more British graduates are coming through, the Department of Health is trying to get round the rights of HSMP doctors who have already made Britain their home because it failed to plan ahead.
“This follows similar abrupt changes in the immigration rules that unfairly affected thousands of overseas doctors living in Britain who having once been made welcome now found themselves forced to leave the country without any proper warning.”
Unfortunately a number of those affected have already made alternative plans & even left the country but it is still a positive development showing the DoH that they will be called to account. The BBC archive is a good way of exploring this further.
The head of the national NHS pay negotiations is facing a series of strikes in his own backyard for failing to pay out on a deal he negotiated as part of the Agenda for Change agreement for 1.1 million health workers.
Electricians and maintenance staff at Doncaster and Bassetlaw hospitals foundation trust are to walk out every Monday this month over the refusal by Joe Brayford, the trust’s human resources director, to offer £3,000-a-year retention and recruitment payments which should be given to staff across the NHS.
Either Gordon Brown wants to devolve management of the NHS to an independent board as the FT claims or he does not as suggested in today’s Observer. The Observer editorialexamination of likely policies in the Telegraph tries laying out the odds.
Scrap private NHS clinics - Odds: 3-1
The Private Finance Initiative is safe. But, to mark a break with the past and mollify left-wing MPs and trade unions, Brown may rein in another Blairite pet policy - the use of independent sector treatment centres, or ISTCs.
Privately run but state-funded, the success of these centres will determine the fate of several listed companies. Investors have shelled out millions to meet the cost of building ISTCs - which often charge a lot more than the NHS to conduct minor operations.
Ministers insist their target to spend £550m a year on ISTC operations, treating 250,000 patients, remains in place. But some of the companies involved privately suspect the programme will be scaled back.
Ominously, a recent government-backed report said, in some cases, ISTCs may be compromising patient safety.
Health-related investment projects often sound great in theory, but then end up going wrong. If Brown wants to stamp his authority on the NHS, then ISTCs could also end up looking sick.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
In another call for public debate about the future of the NHS, the BMA has come out with a call for prioritisation.
The BMA proposes the drawing up of a new patients’ charter specifying those health services to which every citizen across England should be entitled, regardless of the local health authority’s financial situation. They also want to see a second list of all the treatments which the sick will get only if their primary care trust has the money, and if doctors decide they are clinically worthwhile.
Senior BMA sources say their report recognises the reality that despite record investment in the NHS, ‘postcode lotteries’ are rife. Primary care trusts, the local NHS organisations that commission and pay for care from hospitals on behalf of patients, are increasingly rejecting requests to pay for procedures or drugs because they are not perceived to be the best use of funds.
Some PCTs have been bitterly criticised for refusing to pay for expensive new cancer drugs; treatment to prevent older people going blind through age-related eye degeneration and operations to help obese patients lose weight through stomach-stapling.
An inevitable consequence of such prioritisation will be that the threshold for accessing the secondary list will become much higher. Optional treatments that will cost the service money are hardly likely to be offered & we will still have a postcode lottery anyway.
“The problem is that too often prisoners are treated as if they are trying to get one over on the staff, that they are not ill or do not have health needs.”
A £374 million hospital in Bristol going out to tender this week will be the test case for the scheme which a DoH senior official said would “compensate” private sector consortiums for rising tendering costs following EU laws which came into force at the end of January.
In the case of Bristol, the “runner-up” company could receive around £6 million, while a third firm may also be paid. North Bristol NHS trust is planning the 947-bed hospital, which is due to open in Southmead by 2013.
New EU legislation requiring short-listed bidders to work up more detailed proposals, would push up the bid costs by an additional 2 per cent.
Mr Coates said the DoH’s private finance unit was now considering plans under which a “significant proportion” of that extra cost would be paid back by hospitals.
The DoH is understood to be the only Government department drawing up proposals for such payments.
Given the poor state of the tendering process in the DoH surely this funding needs to be accompanied by much greater scrutiny of the bids as well as changes in the process. So far I have seen nothing to suggest that there will be an improvement in standards.
There is a report of treatment in the French healthcare system with a suggestion that it faces the same challenges & criticisms as the NHS.
Hospitals are being shut to save money; bed numbers are being cut in those that remain; waiting for treatment is common, even when you have a booked appointment; and given the famous French “pudeurâ€, there is an extraordinary lack of concern for patients’ privacy and dignity.
Ordinary French patients pay for their care with a mixture of state funding and private insurance. For those without private insurance, treatment for costly or rare conditions may be limited. There is not enough capacity in the system because of the classic problem of “bed blocking†that is just as familiar in Britain – old people who can’t be discharged from hospital because intermediate care or convalescent homes no longer exist.
A tabloid newspaper has invited its readers to select the Greatest Living Briton from a list it has drawn up. Almost all the individuals who’ve made Britain what it is today are present – Kate Moss, Wayne Rooney, Lenny Henry, Ozzy Osbourne, Charlotte Church and so on. But there is one glaring omission: where on earth is the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt?
I suspect a fix: the paper realised that Pat – like Churchill, Shakespeare and Nelson in previous contests – would walk it and thus rob the feature of its edge.
Hewitt was on Question Time last week, reaping her usual harvest of public adulation. “Boooooo! Booooooo!†and “Resign, you useless cow!†people shouted, with enormous affection. Cabinet ministers should only resign, she told the howling audience, when they have made a serious policy blunder – and then admitted presiding over a record three catastrophes in her brief tenure (a useless computer system costing billions, putting thousands of junior doctors out of work and increasing bureaucracy).
But it is part of her selfless nature that she is unable to take responsibility for any of it. In fact, ministers never resign as a result of a policy blunder. They resign because they have been caught out on a technicality, or discovered with their trousers down by the side of the M4, watching badgers. Which fate will befall Pat?
But there is a dissenting voice in the Guardian with a suggestion that perhaps the grilling was overdone. Unfortunately he seems to have skipped the stage of checking his facts before putting pen to paper.
Doctors do not think that they have a call on public funds to the detriment of others. What they object to is the wanton thoughtless destruction.
And as the competition ratios make perfectly clear the mythical oversubscription for plastic surgery posts while ignoring elderly care medicine is a lie. The stats by specialty tell the real story. There are 544 applicants for 101 posts in Geriatric Medicine. Is Patricia Hewitt ready to fund more posts for them since she claims that it is an undersubscribed specialty?
Campaigners plan to “hijack” the Government’s forthcoming changes to the law on fertilisation and embryology to stage what would be the first full-scale Commons vote on lowering the legal limit for 17 years.
A leaked memo from Caroline Flint, the public health minister, has revealed that ministers are preparing to be confronted with the incendiary move.
In a letter to Tony Blair, John Prescott and Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, dated May 3, Miss Flint sets out her proposals to publish her draft Human Tissue and Embryos Bill.
But she admits: “There is a possibility that some members may wish to use the opportunity presented by the draft Bill to discuss wider issues dealt with by the original legislation… and related topics of interest, notably abortion (under the Abortion Act 1967).
“Provisional advice from the House authorities suggests that these topics could not simply be ruled out as a matter of scope.”
Many social conservatives feel that the current 24-week period is too long while some Tory MPs have signalled their support for a move to reduce it.
Inevitably the scientific debate will be overshadowed by the emotive & political one, especially by people with inadequate knowledge of medical issues. If we are to have a debate, can I atleast call for a properly informed one, not tub-thumping by Anne Widdecombe?
Nice denied approval for the life-extending chemotherapy drug Alimta in June last year, subject to consultation which closed last month. Final guidance is due for publication in September. The uncertainty over NHS funding for chemotherapy treatment (which is still available in parts of the country, including Manchester, Liverpool and certain London boroughs) comes at a time when campaigners are increasingly concerned about the financial security of families blighted by the disease, despite new government proposals for fast-tracking financial support for those diagnosed with the devastating illness.
So do we spend money on choice or do we provide treatments such as this to patients? I know what I would prefer.
The reporting makes it sound as though it is limited to IT programmes & to reviews conducted by the OGC only but other departments sometimes conduct their own. I look forward to some interesting reading.
Mr Thomas said: “The tribunal has confirmed my view that the public interest in disclosing the gateway review . . . was stronger than any public interest in it remaining secret.” He was also pleased at the tribunal’s signal “that it cannot be assumed that information in gateway reviews falls outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act”.
I might put in a few requests of my own once this is settled.
And there is a discussion in the Letters page of the Guardian about the Mental Health Bill, which also got a mention last night from the Question Time audience.
In health, Scotland initially set out to prove that the pre-1989 version of the National Health Service could be made to work - that, in effect, all the NHS really needed was more money. NHS Trusts and the internal market were abolished and Scotland refused to have anything to do with brutal English targets for waiting times, or the introduction of competition, choice and the use of the private sector.
Wales, likewise, rejected targets. Instead, it put its investment into community health and prevention. Both initially saw waiting times rise, sometimes sharply, rather than fall. English Labour politicians tended, as a result, to feel superior.
But Scottish waiting times are now falling and some English health policy analysts are starting to see merit in Scotland’s more integrated healthcare, fretting about the fragmentation that the English competition model risks.
In Wales, Richard Wyn Jones, director of the Institute of Welsh Politics at Aberystwyth, says professionals remain more trusted than in England, and “they certainly feel that Wales has done well to avoid the distorting excesses of English target mania”.
In what appears to be an unacceptable & humongous breach of security, the much maligned MTAS website was found to be critically lacking in protection for the personal details including among other things addresses, sexual orientation & phone numbers of hundreds of applicants (Foundation programme applicants) according to Channel 4 news who were made aware of it this afternoon.
They showed footage of the website on the 7 ‘0′ clock news this evening with Jo Hilbourne from the BMA & Matthew Jamieson Evans from Remedy UK onscreen to comment. Andrew Lansley was on air to excoriate the govt who didn’t bother to send anyone to the studio to catch the flak.
“I’m absolutely gob-smacked, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’m not going to be able to laugh because it’s so serious. After I’ve scraped my jaw up off the floor I’ll say that I’m not really surprised - it’s a level of ineptitude that has characterised this whole procecss. It takes the concept of a botched IT job just to a new dimension.”
- Matt Jameson-Evans, Remedy UK
Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley:
There should be redress against anybody who is responsible for such a serious breach of people’s data confidentiality. But frankly, I come back to the point I was making a moment ago. We know that more than a month ago there was a risk to security.
There is an open challenge to the DoH from Jon Snow to send anyone in for an on-air explanation. Patricia Hewitt / Lord Hunt / Andy Burnham / Caroline Flint / anyone?
Throughout the junior doctors’ recruitment saga, we’ve been asking the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to appear on the programme, but she’s always declined - and tonight was no exception.
We offer her an open invitation to come on to Channel 4 News.
Who knows for how long the information has been exposed! It has been available for atleast a day. (Channel 4 reported on the 26th that the data had been exposed atleast for 3 days.)
The website was secured late this evening but the flannel put out claiming that it was accessed via an URL not meant to be available to the public is ridiculous. Putting the information on an excel spreadsheet without even a simple password protecting it is not just negligence, it is idiocy. Then placing it on a publicly accessible location is another thing altogether.
I hope that each & every applicant potentially affected by this complains to the Information Commissioner. Fines can & should be levied. (The initial response that there was nothing they could do on the other hand needs explaining by the IC).
And this is a government that claims to be able to secure the massive amounts of information an ID card database or the Electronic Patient Record (Spine) will collect. Show some competence in protecting the data of a few thousand people before attempting to do so for the entire country.
The muppets at Methods Consultingshould not be allowed near a computer again.
Pensioners led by Donald Giddings, a 78-year-old heart patient, are challenging the way in which the decision to downgrade health services in the Hertfordshire town of Hemel Hempstead was made.
This week, the High Court in London set a date for a judicial review that will examine claims by the Dacorum Hospital Action Group that the views of the public were “misrepresented” during the consultation over the proposed changes.
The group, represented by Matrix, the law chambers of which Cherie Booth, the Prime Minister’s wife, is a member, claim that their views were ignored during a consultation led by John Underwood, a former Labour spin doctor hired by West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust last July.
The consultation failed to ask them about plans to close Hemel Hempstead General Hospital’s accident and emergency department, which had already been discussed alongside plans to build a large hospital elsewhere in the county.
None the less, thousands of members of the public told the trust that they did not want to lose their casualty department. However, when health chiefs admitted last November that they could not afford to build the new hospital, they said that Hemel Hempstead would still be stripped of most of its services.
“Cooked” surveys & consultation exercises which aim to produce a report supporting policy goals desired by those in charge can easily be recognised and are not worth much. Accusations of politically driven policy are already being thrown around.
I will admit that I am teetotal & therefore can be accused of wanting to force my opinions on people who are merely enjoying themselves by supporting a ban on the advertising of alcopops. If Patricia Hewitt does really go ahead with this, I will count it as one of her more sensible interventions. ‘Why do I feel this way?’, you are entitled to ask. Years of exposure to completely wasted teens & pre-teens during my time in A&E along with a feeling of horror that the harm done to thousands of babies is not being recognised. The Telegraph highlights the dangers of foetal alcohol syndrome.
Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is the umbrella term for a range of disorders caused by a mother drinking alcohol while pregnant.
With 750,000 live births each year in this country, it is a condition that affects 7,500 children annually - more than the combined number of babies born with muscular dystrophy, spina bifida, HIV and Down’s syndrome.
A recent study indicated that 61 per cent of women don’t cut down at all, and a survey carried out by St George’s hospital in London revealed that just under 50 per cent of mothers visiting the teenage antenatal clinic drank more than four units on a single occasion and 27 per cent admitted to at times “getting drunk”.
In Britain, teenage drinking is much more widespread among girls than boys, with almost 30 per cent of under 20-year-olds confessing to drinking to excess at least three times a month.
The sale of packs of 10 cigarettes - attractive to teenagers because they are cheaper - would be banned and cigarettes kept out of sight in shops.
The proposals, contained in a report from the British Medical Association, also include plans to compel retailers to obtain licences to sell tobacco, to outlaw tobacco vending machines and impose regular and above-inflation price increases to try to cut demand.
Accusations of supporting the nanny state bother me not a tad.
And this intervention sounds like it has the right combination of solid theory & practical implementation to make it work. I await details of the MEND programme with interest.
The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, a Government agency set up to improve efficiency asked staff at four hospitals to track the amount of time their colleagues spent on different tasks. Particular problems, such as the way mealtimes were organised, were videoed so that staff could suggest ways to speed it up.
A reasonable method as long as not taken to extremes.
Nurses spend less than four hours in 10 treating patients, because of the demands of paperwork and poor hospital layout. They spend a quarter of their time hunting for equipment and drugs or, because of poor design, walking around the ward. Almost as much time was lost to paperwork and handovers between staff changing shifts.
The findings come as a separate survey of 1,300 nurses by Nursing Times revealed that nine out of 10 blamed a lack of time for poor patient care. Almost half had to leave the wards “unacceptably” often, in order to pick up missing equipment or supplies, while more than 40 per cent said they had to take on portering duties too often. Three quarters described themselves as frustrated.
Plenty of us can sympathise.
Liz Ward, a nurse manager at Barnsley Hospital in South Yorkshire, one of the hospitals involved, said that the study showed that technology distanced staff from patients, with records held on computers at hubs, rather than on paper by the beds. Her ward is piloting a return to the traditional system.
“A paper system by the bed means the nurse is actually with the patient when she is taking the notes,” she said.
I wonder how much notice is going to be taken of this example!
The Independent (which is becoming more of a tabloid with its idiotic crusade about mobile phones & Wi-Fi) covers the problems caused by the increasing problem with obesity.
Unison warns on the eve of its conference in Brighton that other healthcare professionals might go on strike unless an improved pay offer is made.
Unison national officer Karen Jennings outlined this stance before the start of its health workers conference.
“I think a strike is certain if we can’t get the government to come back to the table and talk”, she said.
“Our members are extremely angry and this is going to be very, very clear from conference when we leave it - what course of action we’ll be taking and this will be on the back of a range of other health organisations who are also very, very angry.”
After speaking at the conference about the role of unions and the government in helping people in poorer countries, Mr Benn took questions from delegates.
One asked: “Why doesn’t the government continue to provide an example to the rest of the world on how to deliver health care and keep the NHS going, rather than going down the road of following the American method of putting greed before need?“
Mr Benn responded saying the NHS had 85,000 more nurses in the past decade, adding there would also be a 10% increase in the funding available to the NHS.
Sir - On my way back to the ward today from life-support training, given by a disgruntled paramedic, I bumped into a tearful pharmacist whose pay had just been slashed by “Agenda for Change”.
Then, on passing the doctors’ mess, I waved to two of my colleagues who are leaving medicine before being forced into unemployment, and entered the ward only to interrupt the nursing handover, where industrial action and ward closures were being discussed angrily.
Luckily, I didn’t meet any jobless physiotherapists or overworked midwives en route or I might have become rather depressed myself.
Well done, Patricia Hewitt; as the Secretary of State for Health, you have successfully managed to destroy any staff morale left in the NHS across almost every specialty. Do you really think it will be long before patient care suffers?
Dr Graham Robertson, Glasgow
An intriguing mention in the Guardian of the proposed launch of an insurance policy from WPA guaranteeing the availability of chemotherapy if diagnosed with cancer.
The policy gives access to the most modern and expensive cancer drugs for less than £100 a year. Patients covered by a WPA policy would be treated on the NHS, but the cost of the drugs prescribed would be underwritten.
Speaking of cancer, the Scottish Cervical Call-Recall System (SCCRS) is back in trouble. The earlier concerns were to do with security but it appears that the IT teams north of the border have not learnt from the difficulties CfH has faced. The Herald & the Scotsman cover it prominently.
A new computerised cancer screening system planned for Scotland is unreliable and “dangerous to patient care“, according to GPs.
Doctors are calling for the cervical cancer screening system, which is due to be launched in Scotland on May 28, to be delayed so technical issues can be ironed out.
Hundreds of staff members have taken a two-hour training course to learn how to use the software for the system, but they say there are issues with the equipment and no way to revert to the paper system if the software fails.
The NHS National Services in Scotland, however, insisted the software is “state of the art”, and that, in the event of isolated IT problems, surgeries could revert to the paper system.
GP Jim O’Neil, a member of Glasgow medical committee, said: “We do not have a problem with a national call and recall system, which is a great idea. Our concern is with the additional things they insist happen that are not friendly to the way practices work and we think are probably dangerous to patient care.”
A delay is a lot more palatable than an embarassing failure I would have thought. Or is listening to critical users a sign of weakness?
And finally, an interesting strategy seems to be behind the Terra Firma / Wellcome Trust bid for Boots. The Telegraph & the Times each have a different take on it with some mild spinning against the bid in the Guardian.
Guy Hands is trying to build an international healthcare empire that would combine BUPA’s hospitals with chemist chain Alliance Boots under an umbrella brand of “Wellness”.
Terra Firm is plotting a joint bid with Macquarie for BUPA’s 26 hospitals and is due to meet Alliance Boots’ management on Tuesday morning to discuss its indicative £11.26p a share for the retailer.
If successful Hands would merge the two businesses in a move that would see him shift Alliance Boots’ focus away from pharmaceutical wholesaling and on to NHS support services and other personal healthcare initiatives.
Sources say Terra Firma and its co-bidder for Alliance Boots medical charity the Wellcome Trust see massive strategic potential in the local pharmacies, following a pilot National Health Service initiative to tender out the running of GP surgeries to private companies.
Meanwhile KKR’s strategy has emerged as wholly different. It is thought the US private equity house plans to make a raft of large acquisitions of wholesale companies around the world. It has already identified two major wholesalers in South America and has its eye on dozens of others around the world.
It is also considering moving into the healthcare insurance market, through a tie-up with a company such as Pru Health.
Terra Firma faces several handicaps in trying to buy Alliance Boots. The healthcare group has agreed to pay an 11p-a-share “break fee†if the board withdraws its support for the £10.6 billion offer already made by the private-equity firm KKR.
And Alliance Boots has agreed that KKR will be given the details of any new bid from a rival if it considers switching its support to the newcomer. In effect, KKR will then have the option to top any competing offer.
(It is) ….. calling on MPs to accept a series of amendments put forward by the House of Lords, which psychiatrists, mental health charities and patients have said would help to create laws fit for the 21st century.
These include the demand that children be treated in wards suitable for their age, not with adults, and be assessed by specially trained professionals.
Today we also publish figures from the charity Young Minds which expose the “national scandal” of how children as young as 12 are incarcerated with often extremely disturbed adults and end up more traumatised than when they went in for treatment.
The study found that one child every day is admitted to an adult mental health ward under section; that more than three-quarters of girls are detained on mixed-sex wards; that the average stay is at least one month; and that children face a postcode lottery over beds.
But it is understood that the Government is not prepared to make any concessions and has put Labour MPs on a three-line whip in an attempt to bulldoze the Bill through.
I am unable to understand this dogmatic belief in the superiority of the govt position. Do they consider listening to other points of view a weakness in a contest of machismo?
The House of Lords has amended the Bill in several important respects, refocusing provisions so that patients’ rights are properly safeguarded, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Mental Health Alliance agree that this is now a Bill which can be supported. Unfortunately, the Government has declared its intention to overturn some of the Lords’ amendments.
The introduction of supervised community treatment orders (SCTOs) is a key provision of the Bill. A recent international review of such orders carried out by the Institute of Psychiatry (which had been commissioned by the Department of Health) concluded that there was no evidence that SCTOs actually worked. Despite these findings, the Government is planning to proceed with SCTOs and to make provision in the Bill to the effect that patients who might fail to comply with their treatment following discharge could forcibly be returned to hospital.
Ignoring evidence that contradicts pet policies is a favoured govt trick. As is having an ulterior motive behind policy that claims to improve health:
One of the major failings, in our view, is that the Government has promised this Bill as a means of improving public safety, rather than seeking to improve mental health services for patients.
One of the key objections among experts, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Law Society, has been the concern that the Government’s reforms will increase the powers of psychiatrists to lock people up before they have committed any crime. Under existing laws, people had to be treatable for this to happen but ministers removed this treatability clause, much to the concern of psychiatrists and mental-health charities.
Then there is the “news” that the policy against drugs is a total failure. According to the Guardian:
The number of young people using cocaine and cannabis has increased rapidly over the past 20 years despite high-profile campaigns, such as the £9m ‘Frank’ initiative aimed at 11 to 15-year-olds, according to an in-depth examination of official efforts to tackle Britain’s chronic drug problem. It is also expected to claim that Britain’s ‘unusually severe drug problem compared with that of our European neighbours’ is linked to social and economic deprivation, that punitive laws have had little effect and that police efforts to disrupt the drugs trade have also failed.
The report will be launched on Wednesday by the new UK Drugs Policy Commission, whose members include distinguished figures from the worlds of health, policing, drugs research and academia. They include David Blakey, a former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Annette Dale-Perera of the NHS-funded National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse and Professor Colin Blakemore, who leads the Medical Research Council.
The report cites an array of official statistics charting the steady growth in Britain’s drugs culture. For example, according to the 2005 British Crime Survey, 40.4 per cent of 16 to 19-year-olds have used drugs at some point in their lifetime, as have 49 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds, 51.6 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds and 45.8 per cent of 30 to 34-year-olds.
The report, launched on Wednesday, will be seen as an indictment of decades of campaigning and government policy. The cost of drug-related crime is now reported at £13 billion a year, linked to the increase in the number of heroin addicts, reportedly up from 5,000 in 1975 to an estimated 281,000 now.
The three main tactics of ministers — media campaigns that heroin “screws you up†in the 1980s, initiatives in schools to educate children as young as seven, and targeting the most at-risk groups — have made virtually no difference, the report claims.
Up to one person in three arrested on suspicion of crimes in Britain is on hard drugs, the Government will be told this week.
A damning report will blame heroin and cocaine addicts for high levels of offending, particularly shoplifting, as they steal to fund their habit.
A spokesman for the charity DrugScope said that few among those arrested would be taking both heroin and cocaine. He also said that the proportion of suspects who were charged and found to be on hard drugs could be much higher - as many as six out of 10 - than the one in three figure for those who were arrested.
“As many as 60 per cent of those who are charged with criminal offences have some dependency on hard drugs so the figure related to arrests does not really tell the full story of the link between hard drugs and crime,” he said.
The lack of treatment facilities for addicts of course is a national problem & rather a long-standing one. Pretty much every doctor has jumped through hoops on a regular basis to get some help for their patients.
The paper’s publication will mark the launch of the UK Drug Policy Commission. The commission will analyse the impact of existing drug laws and investigate whether radical solutions, such as providing addicts with free heroin on the NHS, could reduce the harm done by drugs. It will be headed by Dame Ruth Runciman, who chaired the inquiry in 2000 that led to the Government relaxing the law on cannabis.
Let’s face it, at this stage pretty much anything is worth trying. It might also be worth buying up the supply, what with the failed policies in Afghanistan that have left the country with no other option but to produce drugs.
Britain should consider making the legal drinking age 21 as it has “lost the plot” when it comes to regulating alcohol, claims the IPPR. Public Policy Research (PPR), the journal of the think-tank, says it is time to practice “tough love”, such as reviewing the minimum drinking age.
The UK has one of the worst problems in Europe with a fifth of children aged 11 to 15 drinking at least once a week.
“There is a sense that the regulatory landscape is lopsided.
“Licensing reform, resistance to a debate on taxation, the cancellation of the Alcohol Misuse Enforcement Campaigns which raised the profile of underage drinking issues - all happening at a time when alcohol-related harm is rising - seem to suggest the government is more concerned about making sure the drinks industry operates with as little interference as possible than with seriously grasping the nettle.”
I have to agree there. Industry has more say in policy than the public interest.
Round-the-clock drinking was meant to uncork, even in the moodiest boulevards of Bognor, a sophisticated Left Bank cafe society, with bright young things charging glasses of chilled pinot grigio while discussing existentialist philosophy.
Alas, a year-and-a-half later, the nearest we typically come to existential angst in the early hours is when concerned friends asking paramedics: ‘Is she dead or just unconscious?‘
The number of medical procedures carried out by the NHS for alcohol-related conditions such as liver disease have doubled in a decade, to 262,844 a year. The number taken to A&E with alcohol-related injuries has also doubled since 1997, to 148,477 a year. This includes 8,299 under-18s, a 40 per cent increase in three years. Did you know - I certainly didn’t - that 22 per cent of 11-year-olds admit they have had a drink at some point? By 13, children who abstain are in a minority. Moreover, 30 per cent of the population are bingers and 15 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds are alcoholics.
If youngsters awake with sore heads, society is left with a hangover, too. There are 367,000 violent attacks a year caused by alcohol. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, 60 per cent of binge-drinkers admitted to criminal or disorderly behaviour. Drinkers were five times more likely to fight and 13 per cent of those excluded from school were suspended for drinking. Society no longer tolerates passive smoking, so why passive boozing, which is what innocent folk endure with a clunking fist on a Saturday night?
Booze drains into all areas of life. To raise the vulgar matter of money: alcohol problems lose Europe between 2 and 5 per cent of GNP. There is a link between binge-drinking and teenage pregnancies and evidence that drink leads to drugs.
The booze industry urges restraint, not regulation.
They would, wouldn’t they.
Which finally leads on the the question of treatment for all these societal ills, with the Guardian asking the question “what’s it really like in the Priory?”:
All I know is that if you ever find yourself drinking and/or taking drugs and not being able to stop, no matter how hard you try, no matter how hideous the consequences for you and the people around you, then you could do a lot worse than think about a brief spell in one of the many Priories or similar private and NHS treatment centres dotted around the UK. You probably won’t get to meet Kate Moss. But it might just save your life.
Tony Blair pledged at the Labour Party conference in 1999 that everyone would have access to an NHS dentist. Last week, more than seven years later, the Department of Health slipped out figures showing that 55.7 per cent of adults and 70.5 per cent children had been seen by an NHS dentist in the previous 24 months. Yesterday, a report from the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux revealed that 77 per cent of the 4,000 respondents to their survey said they could not find an NHS dentist prepared to accept them. There is still a very long way to go to meet Tony Blair’s pledge.
Ms Winterton told the Today programme on Radio 4 that it was “unfair” for some dentists to seek extra cash at the expense of others who planned their work better.
She defended the system after being told of a practice in Fulham, south west London, which had been forced to put seven of its eight dentists “on holiday” despite demand.
Susie Sanderson, chair of the BDA’s executive board, said: “When the Government is failing to meet even its own success criteria for the new contract, then it’s time for urgent action.
“We now have a reductive, target-driven system that is failing both patients and dentists.
Rosie Winterton, the health minister, said: “The overall picture is that, despite the speculation, the number of dentists is growing and rather than leaving they are actually keen to expand their work for the NHS - hardly indicative of a failing system.â€
The National Health Service is to get a minimum of 3 per cent real-terms growth a year between 2008 and 2011, Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary has said.
Following last week’s Budget, and the chancellor’s settlement for education in the comprehensive spending review, Ms Hewitt told the Financial Times that the NHS “will continue to grow, and grow faster than the rate of economic growth -generally”.
Asked if that meant a minimum of 3 per cent, given Treasury forecasts that the economy will grow at 2.75 per, she said in an interview: “That is your deduction, but I am not dissenting from it.”
The figure of 3 per cent is below the 4.4 per cent that the 2002 Wanless review suggested was the minimum the NHS was likely to need after 2008.
The service will head towards reducing the total maximum wait for treatment to 18 weeks, and that “will not be an old, top-down, performance-management target”, but would be achieved by staff themselves reshaping the way services were provided.
The “staff” want to improve services. The last few years have been all about hobbling their ability to do so with increasing layers of management.
prompting claims ministers are pressuring the NHS to release patients early to help cut waiting times. Government figures, obtained by the Conservatives, showed that the number of emergency readmissions had risen by nearly a third since 2002.
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley said hospitals were discharging people too early because of NHS targets.
The government said readmissions were often unrelated to the earlier visit.
In the last quarter of 2002-3, 5.5% of patients were readmitted as emergency cases less than a month after being released.
By the last quarter of 2005-6, this had risen to 7.1%.
A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “The decision to discharge patients is made by clinicians.
I am sure that there will be plenty of clinicians available to test that statement.
An NHS Alliance poll of 651 GPs found 70% often received papers late and many said the forms were not complete, compromising safety.
It was things like these that the Electronic Patient Record was supposed to fix, simple solutions using existing technology.
Among information which was reported to be missing were the patient’s name, contact details, medication and treatment.
Incorrect or insufficient data on medication, such as potentially toxic drugs like warfarin, has even led to patients being readmitted to hospital because of complications such as internal bleeding and strokes.
In one instance, a discharge summary was received but failed to mention that the patient had just spent a week in intensive care following a stroke and heart attack.
Some 58% of GPs reported the problems meant clinical care was compromised in the last year, with 39% claiming it had put patients at risk.
Overworked staff with no time to even document what treatment they have provided sounds familiar all right.
Speaking of IT systems,
Professor Michael Thick, clinical officer of Connecting for Health said that interoperability was an issue which would be high on the computing agenda for a while, citing the two main systems suppliers in the National Programme for IT as an example of the problems being faced.
“The standards of Cerner and iSoft are based on different structures which are not necessarily compatible at the moment and given that we have not been able to agree on a consensus on coding, interoperability is something we are hoping for but will not necessarily happen.â€
Connecting for Health has today issued its tender for bids to join the catalogue of ‘additional systems suppliers’.
The tender in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) for an ‘Additional Supply Capability and Capacity (ASCC) Framework Agreement’ is open to a maximum of 500 suppliers, for a period of up to four years. The estimated value of the tender is £100m.
I try to look at motives, the behind the scenes machinations why a position is taken & make it a point not to be influenced unduly by any personal consideration or gain. Well, I try anyway but not always successfully. Claiming to be holier than thou is not realistic.
I am sure that my outspokenness on here has put off a few potential clients but there is only so much I can compromise on. Wired goes into it in a little more detail.
Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong.
“You can’t hide anything anymore,” Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders.
No, this post is not brought on by any major crises of faith or ethical dilemmas & I am not aware of the location of a smoking gun.
But just how far will people go to hide negative opinions, especially if personal gain is involved?
I recently posted a few comments on a major newspaper’s website, nothing libellous or close to but pointing out mistakes / economies with the truth of one of their star columnists. None of the comments made it past moderation. Once is possibly an error, twice less likely to be so. More than that & there is likely to be something going on.
Today, I posted on a site that takes in quite a bit in industry sponsorship. The comment questioned the value of a particular transaction & drew attention to its poor record of performance. No show. I can only think that the fear of offending an advertiser was greater than the commitment to telling the truth.
Hiding from the truth doesn’t make it less correct or even go away. Intellectual honesty is a pre-requisite.
The co-founder of iSoft, the embattled IT company at the heart of the government’s troubled £6.2bn NHS IT upgrade project, was sacked yesterday after being suspended since the beginning of August.
The company said Steve Graham, former commercial director, had been “removed as a director” and had “ceased to be an employee of iSoft.” This move follows his suspension on full pay of £385,000 from August 8, “following an initial investigation into possible accounting irregularities in the financial years ended 30 April 2004 and 2005.” Another employee was suspended alongside Mr Graham, but the company refused to disclose their identity. A spokesman for the company said the financial terms for Mr Graham’s departure had not yet been agreed, but added: “It is not our intention to pay any compensation.”
As I do for the BMA or the Royal Colleges, especially after their behaviour over the years.
I am not capable of the cognitive dissonance, the moral bankruptcy of the position that “I’m al-right jack” & that other peoples problems are of no consequence.
The MDU guidance on the Electronic Patient Record is worth considering fully. It is difficult for me to understand how anyone who considers fully the positions being eluded can go along with current CfH plans.
“GPs will need to consider, therefore, whether they can rely on implied consent, or whether they need to seek express consent from their patients in order to upload their data onto the summary care record.
“GPs will need to consider a number of things. They will need, for example, to satisfy themselves that the CfH [Connecting for Health] publicity campaign had indeed reached all their patients, that all their patients had read and understood the leaflets and, if the GP had not heard from them, had decided not to seek an appointment with the GP to ask any questions, and not to ‘opt out’.â€
In clinical medicine, these are the current ethical transgressions that are being ignored. Is a life in the “Third World” any less sacrosanct than one in the West?
Tens of thousands of elderly Americans have received life-prolonging care as a result of their long-term-care policies. With more than eight million customers, such insurance is one of the many products that companies are pitching to older Americans reaching retirement.
Yet thousands of policyholders say they have received only excuses about why insurers will not pay. Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.
“The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims,†said Mary Beth Senkewicz, who resigned last year as a senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die.â€
Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being wasted in Private Finance Initiative deals to build schools and hospitals, the public spending watchdog says today.
The National Audit Office says in a highly critical report that the tendering process for PFI projects has become even slower and that fewer companies are bidding for deals.
It says that NHS trusts and authorities are spending 75 per cent more than expected on external consultants and that many contracts are uncompetitive and involve only one bidder.
The NAO report blames several NHS trusts for dragging out PFI deals by changing the specifications for the building during the process. In many cases this was done when there was only one bidder left in the field..
In one third of projects examined by the NAO there were big changes during the tendering process, adding 17 per cent to the project value, or an average of £4 million a year.
This is a concern not just with PFI but with other contracts including the ongoing ISTC procurements. The initial analysis & planning that determine the need for the project is usually so poor as to be useless, consisting of perfunctory filled in by people remote from the coal face. The demand analysis is so poor & the the tendering process so inflexible and delayed that the requirements have changed significantly between the original tender & financial close of the successful bid. The sponsor is left with the choice of reassessing the original tender against current information which will cause the delays mentioned or accept the flawed bids as tendered for and hope that the problems do not become public until the staff have moved on & someone else is around to shoulder the blame. There are numerous projects where the initial justification for them has vanished before the process is even completed & the service has got off the ground, which still continue as dead men walking with ever increasing fudges to pretty much every component. There are a number of ongoing DoH programmes that I could cite as examples, including the various ISTC procurements.
So the message is to plan properly & the rest will follow. Inadequate planning on the other hand sets the tone for the failure of the entire enterprise.
There are estimated to be a “missing million” people with diabetes who have not been diagnosed.
The report, assessing the success in implementing the National Service Framework on diabetes, praises the NHS in England for picking up the 100,000 cases.
A second report, published by the Insulin Pumps Working Group, says more should be done to make available the pumps, which infuse the hormone into the layer of tissue just beneath the skin.
The National Health Service is groaning under the weight of inspection and regulation, with at least 56 bodies with a right to visit NHS hospitals and trusts, many without an invitation.
The burden of providing data is even worse than that of playing host to Government inspectors, the report says. Often different bodies call for the same data, but in subtly different forms, so that it must be collated twice at huge cost.
“The sheer number of inspections, standards, and volume of information required to demonstrate compliance is making it difficult for NHS organisations to extract value from these various process and use them to drive improvement in services for patients†the report says.
For the health service is on the cusp of being subjected to European competition law and, should that happen, hospital bail-outs might cease to be legal. The liberalised health service would then resemble Pandora’s box - something which, once opened up, could not again be closed.
Member states have enjoyed autonomy over health, and the European court continues to accept that countries have a right to organise healthcare on non-market lines. However, the court has recently been stressing that if countries decide to run their healthcare as a market then they must play by market rules. And, as new research from the Centre for Health Economics concludes, a host of government reforms in the English NHS - from business-style bankruptcy rules to official classification of hospitals as commercial bodies - effectively invite the court to deem the service a market.
The implications could be profound. Ken Anderson, who recently left the top commercial liaison job in the Department of Health, has said the NHS could soon lose its right to decide which services to deliver itself. If that is correct, neither politicians nor NHS managers could punt work towards public hospitals that need it to remain viable. For if a private company wanted to make a bid for that work, it would have a legal right to be properly considered. Attempts to foster “third-sector” provision, for example nursing co-operatives, would also falter, for such providers could not lawfully be privileged against commercial players.
There are hard-headed economic reasons for not treating healthcare as just another market. Gordon Brown has argued that untrammelled choice can work against rather than for efficiency, given the risk of providers cherry-picking the easier cases, the need for cross-fertilisation between specialisms and the impracticality of patients making decisions about where to receive emergency treatment. Whether his case is accepted or not, it is surely better that it falls to elected politicians - rather than to judges or bureaucrats - to determine where the balance of public and private provision lies.
The main complaint against the current set of changes is that they are not fully thought through & what better illustration of the danger they pose can there be than this, scaremongering though it may seem?
Most of the dangers being warned about are already imminent, the relationship between cause & effect not being strictly proportional.
Speaking of the Commercial Directorate, having a department full of people with minimal experience or knowledge of the health service & very little strategic awareness or consideration towards the wider situation interpret & implement ministerial wishes is not a very good way to reform the NHS, rather an easy way to damage it. It is about choosing process over product & quite a lot of the blame for the current brouhaha about the market based reforms can be laid at the door of expedient decisions.
I wonder what Chris Ham or other advocates of market based reforms have to say about this?
To readers from far & wide:
The server logs make for interesting reading, telling me just who is visiting the site & the topics that interest you.
So can I invite you to participate in the discussion, by telling me why I am wrong if indeed I am so & generally shedding a little light on this brave new world we inhabit.
It is more fun that way, honestly!
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