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A chief inspector of GPs is to be appointed as part of a push to improve services outside of hospitals, ministers are set to announce. In a speech to the King’s Fund on Thursday, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will say that the problems being seen in A&E units are linked to the way GPs work. Mr Hunt will promise to bring back the family doctor – one GP responsible for all the patient’s care – as part of plans to make care more personal.
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The Daily Mail reports that fifty hospital beds have been axed every week since the last election - pushing overstretched accident and emergency wards ever closer to breaking point. Since May 2010, the number of general and acute beds available overnight on hospital wards has fallen by more than 6,500. Dr Peter Carter is quoted as saying: “Removing beds from acute services will only store up problems for the future unless there is investment in community services. Without this investment, patients will inevitably end up in A&E departments and hospitals for treatment they could be receiving in the community, placing further pressure on the system”.
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Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will today unveil plans for a £260m system for electronically prescribing drugs in a first step towards a totally digital NHS by 2018. The fund will at first be used for electronic prescriptions in hospitals before being rolled out to GPs. Mr Hunt said the electronic system will improve patient safety by reducing prescription mistakes and making medical information about patients more readily available to medical staff.
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The Guardian contains an article looking at how frontline staff should embrace a paperless NHS. The article cites recent figures released by the RCN which suggest that on average British nurses spend 17.3% of their time on paperwork and clerical tasks instead of caring for patients. This rounds-up to 2.5 million hours a week.
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One in five accident and emergency units relies entirely on junior doctors at evenings and weekends, according to a report by the College of Emergency Medicine. The study of more than 130 casualty units said that NHS departments were struggling to provide safe care, with doctors working in "intolerable" environments that place patients at risk. In some cases, gaps at evenings and weekends were filled by "middle-grade" doctors, those who have finished basic training but are still learning specialist skills and have yet to qualify as a consultant. However, at one in five A&E units, junior doctors fresh from medical school were the most senior staff working at evenings and weekends. The Foundation Trust Network also warned that casualty units are close to collapse within a year. The Foundation Trust Network (FTN) criticised the funding system in England which penalises A&E units that oversee a rise in patients.
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