Victoria Atkins says she has asked officials to look into claims doctors and nurses who have spoken up were mistreated
The NHS must listen to whistleblowers and investigate their concerns in the interests of patient safety, the health secretary has said.
Victoria Atkins said she had asked officials to look into cases where there were claims of mistreatment of people who had spoken up about the issues they had experienced.
I was around for the Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust report a couple of years ago. All those dead babies, all those mothers and parents talking about not being listened to or respected. All that handwringing from service providers, all those promises from politicians. The recommendations were set up to prevent the experiences we heard about this week (‘I was left lying on the ground in pain’: shocking stories from UK birth trauma inquiry, 13 May). For instance, continuity of midwifery care through the maternal pathway prevents so much of the stuff we read about now.
A review of a limited number of cases of unresponsive patients with severe traumatic brain injuries raised questions about a custom of making a decision within 72 hours.
A new study found that 42 percent of those who had continued life support recovered enough in the next year to have some degree of independence. A few even returned to their former lives.
The number of people stuck in hospital for more than three weeks has risen 15% on pre-Covid levels
Strike action and the social care crisis have left thousands more people trapped in hospital beds with nowhere to go while other patients struggle to access the care, nullifying an increase in funding and NHS staff, it has been reported.
A damning internal review of NHS efficiency carried out last year has reportedly revealed that, despite a £20bn increase in funding since 2018 and 15% more doctors and nurses on the NHS payroll, the health service was carrying out only slightly more routine treatments than it was before Covid.
An NHS trust’s attempts to bring a crucial drug to market itself is hopeful news for patients
Dr Catriona Crombie is the head of rare disease at medical charity LifeArc
Healthcare should make people’s lives better. That fact can hardly be contested. Yet for some patients with rare diseases, commercial interests are dictating who gets to access life-saving treatment and who doesn’t. Pharmaceutical companies have long been driven by global demand and the potential for the highest profits. In the past two decades, the market has exploded: pharma revenues worldwide have exceeded $1tn. For patients with common conditions, this investment in healthcare can only be good news. But the narrow focus of this strategy means that, in the UK, the one in 17 of us who will at some point be affected by a rare condition risk being forgotten.
That is until now. Healthcare providers, driven by a desire to make life-saving treatments more widely available, are increasingly finding new ways of getting them to patients for whom they would have previously been out of reach. Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) recently announced that it was taking the unprecedented step of attempting to obtain the licence itself for a rare gene therapy on a non-profit basis, after the pharmaceutical company that planned to bring it to market dropped out. If successful, it will be the first time that an NHS trust has the authorisation to market a drug for this kind of treatment. The move could act as a proof of concept for bringing drugs to UK patients that pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to risk their profits on.
Dr Catriona Crombie is the head of rare disease at medical charity LifeArc
A bioethicist, she pioneered bedside methods for helping patients, their families and doctors deal with anguishing life-and-death decisions in a high-tech age.
Nancy Dubler, director of the bioethics division at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, spoke in 2005 with Fred Haber, who was at his wife’s bedside after a mediation session.
A psychiatrist, he ran New York-Presbyterian after a landmark merger, improving its patient care and finances and raising money to expand its footprint across the region.
Several lawmakers questioned whether the company had become so large — with tentacles in every aspect of the nation’s medical care — that the effects of the hack were outsize.
Andrew Witty, the chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, acknowledged before the Senate Finance Committee that hackers had found a weakness in its cybersecurity that forced the shutdown of a vast billing and payments system.
A Houston hospital is investigating whether a doctor altered a transplant list to make his patients ineligible for care. A disproportionate number of them have died while waiting for new organs.
Despite the explosion in ransomware hacks like the one against Change Healthcare, regulation is spotty and few new safeguards have been proposed to protect patient data, vulnerable hospitals and medical groups.
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