NICE Quality Standard: renal replacement therapy services
NICE has issued a Quality Standard Renal replacement therapy services (QS72).  This quality standard covers renal replacement therapy services for kidney failure in adults. It partially updates the NICE quality standard for chronic kidney disease. Quality statements 2 to 6 update and replace quality statements 11 to 15 in the quality standard for chronic kidney disease.

Duty of Candour and Fit and Proper Person’s Test
Two new laws have come into force which are designed to help improve patient safety, transparency and leadership in the NHS.  The Duty of Candour places a legal duty on hospital, community and mental health trusts to inform and apologise to patients if there have been mistakes in their care that have led to significant harm.  The Fit and Proper Person’s Test will help to ensure strong and safe leadership in healthcare organisations. Under the new regulations, all NHS board members will be required to undergo the Test before they are appointed.  The Care Quality Commission has published guidance for NHS organisations to help them meet the requirements of these new regulations.

Care contact time
NHS England has published Safer Staffing: A Guide to Care Contact Time. It gives providers a suite of toolkits to support them in making decisions to secure safe staffing care for their patients and service users and recommends that organisations review the contact time staff spend with their patients. It also supports commissioners working with providers to assure themselves that there is sufficient nurse, midwifery and care staff capacity and capability to meet appropriate outcomes and quality standards and, to use commissioning and contractual levers to help secure improvements.

Capitation: a potential new payment model to enable integrated care – Monitor
This document aims to support local service improvement and reconfiguration in 2015/16 and beyond as well as to highlight examples of successful local payment arrangements in the NHS and enable evaluation of emerging potential payment models for use in the NHS.

NHS reference costs 2013 to 2014 – Department of Health
This is the most up-to-date information about how NHS expenditure was used to provide healthcare by NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts. Reference costs are the unit costs to the NHS for providing defined services in a given financial year to NHS patients in England. They are collected and published annually.

NHS England, Monitor and the TDA come together to issue joint guidance to the NHS – NHS England
A collaborative approach to planning across the NHS in England is being taken forward, for the first time, by the three main organisations responsible for the system.
NHS England, Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority will work together to co-produce one set of guidance for NHS commissioners, NHS trusts and foundation trusts. All three will work to collectively build on the recently published Five Year Forward View; galvanising the need for a joined up approach to secure sustainable high quality care across the health and care system.
The 2015/16 planning round provides an important opportunity to establish a foundation for longer term transformation based on the Five Year Forward View and to refresh, and to ensure sustained progress on, the two-year operational plans developed last year.