Leading North West FTs to create ‘foundation chain’ – Health Service Journal
Work has started to create a ‘foundation chain’ between two leading hospital trusts in the North West.  Salford Royal Foundation Trust, and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh FT are in talks about forging an “acute care collaboration”. They submitted a bid to NHS England’s national vanguard scheme to kickstart the project earlier this week.

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The Mindfulness for Staff Project – Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust – The Academy of Fabulous NHS Stuff
The Mindfulness for Staff project is part of the Trust’s approach to improving the health and wellbeing of our staff.  The project began in April 2013, is funded for three years, and is already demonstrating significant impact on the mental well-being of staff.  In advance of the 8 week programme, three hour awareness workshops take place to help staff to decide if this form of support would be beneficial to them.  The content includes teaching about the theory and practice of mindfulness, experiential elements (short guided meditation practices) and some time for discussion.

How to reduce the risk of surgical site infection – Nursing Times – Healthcare Acquired Infections
Surgical site infections are associated with considerable morbidity and mortality. Delivering quality care during the perioperative period is critical to preventing SSIs.

Communications in health care improvement – a toolkit – The Health Foundation
This toolkit is for health care professionals working in improvement who want to understand and use communications to better plan, implement and spread their work.

Faster cancer diagnosis by 2020 – Department of Health
The government has pledged that from 2020, people with suspected cancer will be diagnosed within 28 days of being referred by a GP. The government has committed to spend up to £300 million more on diagnostics every year over the next 5 years to help meet the new 28 day target. Health Education England will start a new national training programme that will provide 200 additional staff with the skills and expertise to carry out endoscopies by 2018. This is in addition to the extra 250 gastroenterologists the NHS has already committed to train by 2020. The newly trained staff will be able to carry out almost a half a million more endoscopy tests on the NHS by 2020. The NHS will identify 5 hospitals across the UK to pilot the new target before the programme is rolled out nationally by 2020.

Spending Review must provide certainty and early investment – NHS Confederation
The NHS Confederation has called on HM Treasury to outline a multi-year funding plan for the NHS in the upcoming spending review, to provide much-needed certainty on healthcare funding over the next five years.  In its representation to the Treasury, which aims to influence the spending review, the organisation also called for social care to be appropriately resourced, cuts to the public health grant reversed, and for limited pay flexibilities to be allowed.

Consultation on closer working between the emergency services – Department of Health
A joint open consultation has been launched by the Department of Health, Home and the Department of Communities and local Government to examine proposals to increase joint working between emergency services, in order to improve effectiveness and deliver savings for the public. The consultation closes on the 23 October 2015.

Waiting time prioritisation – University of York Centre for Health Economics
The University of York Centre for Health Economics has published Waiting time prioritisation: evidence from England. This report looks at how a number of OECD countries have introduced waiting time prioritisation policies which give explicit priority to severely ill patients with high marginal disutility of waiting. This report using administrative data from patients waiting for a publicly funded hip and knee replacement in England during the years 2009-12, finds that patients suffering the most severe pain and immobility have shorter waits than those suffering the least, by about 29% for hip replacement and 9% for knee replacement, and that the association is approximately linear. These differentials are more closely associated with pain than immobility, and are larger in hospitals with longer average waiting times.

Bulletins

• CCG bulletin: Issue 97
• NHS foundation trust bulletin: 9 September 2015
• NHS Workforce Bulletin: 7 September 2015
• Royal College of Surgeons: September 2015
• Social Care Institute for Excellence:  ebulletin 10 September 2015