Sustainability In The NHS – Healthcare Financial Management Association
The HFMA surveyed its members to gather their thoughts on environment sustainability as it launches a new special interest group which focusses on aspects of wider sustainability in the NHS. This briefing summarises the findings.
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Using Research Evidence: A Practice Guide – NESTA
This practice guide has been created to help you use research evidence to improve your work.  It will help you:

• Learn about evidence-informed decision-making, and why research is an essential element of it.
• Understand the different scenarios when using evidence can help you, as well as the types of evidence you might need at different stages of development.
• Explore different types of evidence, how to choose the most appropriate and how to judge its quality.
• Get advice on finding the right evidence to support your case, and how to get your message across once you have it.

Unwarranted variation? NHS Right Care Programme helps – Health Service Journal
Matthew Cripps and John Newton explain how the NHS Right Care model is designed to help drive service improvement and avoid unwarranted variation.  It has been more than five years since the publication of the first NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare, and yet inconsistencies in treatments and services are still a widespread challenge for the NHS.  Much of this variation is unwarranted, in that it does not involve differences in illness, patient preferences or population needs and can therefore be avoided. Unwarranted variation wastes valuable resources and may even do more harm than good.
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Productivity in acute hospitals – are the recommendations of the Carter Review realistic? King’s Fund Blog
The final report of the Carter Review on operational productivity in acute hospitals is the culmination of an impressive work programme. Since its inception in June 2014, the review team has engaged with 136 acute hospitals in England, 40 per cent of which Lord Carter personally visited. In terms of engagement with local leaders in the acute sector, this must surely set the standard.

Implementing the Forward View: Supporting providers to deliver – Monitor –
This report is for NHS provider organisations and is part of a series of planned roadmaps that draw on messages from the NHS shared planning guidance, and set out the key priorities for the organisations responsible for delivering high quality health and care this year and beyond. Each roadmap will reflect a shared vision for the health and care sector as set out in the NHS five year forward view about the challenges ahead, and the choices to be faced about the kind of health and care service required in 2020.

Tomorrow’s world: the future of ageing in the UK – International Longevity Centre
Argues that our ageing society offers significant social and economic opportunities but only if policymakers plan better for the long term. It argues that society is currently not adequately responding to ageing and highlights the key issues within health and social care, housing and retirement funds in relation to this. The report proposes ten long-term indicators of progress including a greater focus on prevention in health care and that the government should deliver a long-term settlement for social care

OECD reviews of health care quality: United Kingdom 2016 –  Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)
This report reviews the quality of health care in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, seeking to highlight best practices, and provides a series of targeted assessments and recommendations for further quality gains in health care. It aims to understand why the NHS in the four nations of the UK do not consistently demonstrate strong performance on international benchmarks of quality despite being a global leader in quality monitoring and improvement.

14 chiefs now deny support for contract imposition – Health Service Journal
Fourteen of the twenty chief executive signatories to David Dalton’s letter to Jeremy Hunt on the junior doctor contract have told HSJ that they do not support imposition of the contract.
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CCG seeks to recreate PCT system via devolution bid – Health Service Journal
Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group and the county council have asked the government for powers to jointly commission all the area’s specialised services, primary care, social care and public health services in a bid to recreate the commissioning system that existed before the Health Act 2012.
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Revealed: How Dalton’s contract letter unravelled – Health Service Journal
NHS chief executives were given just four hours to agree whether or not their name was included in Sir David Dalton’s letter sent to health secretary Jeremy Hunt, it emerged on Friday.
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NICE Quality Standards
NICE has issued two new quality standards:

• Healthcare-associated infections (QS113): This quality standard covers organisational factors in preventing and controlling healthcare-associated infections in secondary care settings.
• Irritable bowel syndrome in adults (QS114): This quality standard covers the diagnosis and management of irritable bowel syndrome in adults. It does not cover other gastrointestinal disorders such as non-ulcer dyspepsia, coeliac disease and inflammatory bowel disease.

Eyes on Evidence
The latest edition of Eyes on Evidence (February 2016) includes the following items:

• Risk of intracranial bleeding when antidepressants are used with NSAIDs
• Early identification of dementia with IQCODE in secondary care
• Smoking during pregnancy and risk of stillbirth
• Parental perceptions of child weight
• Long working hours, stroke and coronary heart disease
• Evidence summaries from NICE’s Medicines and Prescribing Programme

• Restless legs syndrome: Oxycodone/naloxone prolonged release
• External genital and perianal warts: green tea (Camellia sinensis) leaf extract 10% ointment

Bulletins

• National Institute of Health Research HTA Programme bulletin – February 2016
• NHS Workforce Bulletin: 8 February 2016
• GP Collections Bulletin: Issue 33, 4 February 2016
• Royal College of Surgeons Bulletin: issue 98 2 February 2016