The King’s Fund comments on Health Committee Chair’s letter to the Chancellor – Press release  31 October 2016
Commenting on a letter from the Chair of the Health Committee to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Richard Murray, Director of Policy at The King’s Fund, said: ‘The most urgent priority for the Autumn Statement is to increase funding for social care. Years of budget cuts have had a significant impact on older people, their families and carers, and are exacerbating pressures on the NHS, with record numbers of patients who are fit to be discharged but are delayed in hospital. As the Care Quality Commission has recently said, the social care market is approaching a tipping point and there are real fears about whether the market will continue to be sustainable.

Stoke survival
New research has been published by the University of Aberdeen and University of East Anglia which shows having the optimal number of trained nurses available to look after patients in an acute stroke unit was consistently found to be the best predictor of survival from stroke– after personal health factors were accounted for, such as age, stroke severity and blood pressure. The study found that just one additional trained nurse per ten beds could reduce the chance of death after thirty days by up to twenty-eight per cent, and after one year by up to twelve per cent.

Specialist rehabilitation
The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership has published Specialist rehabilitation for patients with complex needs following major injury report 2016. The report presents the outputs from the work in the first year of the National Clinical Audit of Specialist Rehabilitation for Patients with Complex Needs following Major Injury (NCASRI) programme.

Recovering the cost of NHS treatment for overseas patients
The National Audit Office has published Recovering the cost of NHS treatment for overseas visitors. NHS Trusts in England are legally obliged to check whether patients are eligible for free non-emergency NHS treatment and to recover any costs from overseas patients. This shows that the government is expected to fall well short of its target of recovering £500m a year from overseas visitors treated in NHS hospitals in England.

HSJ roundup: (contact the library for further details on any of these HSJ articles)

• Leak reveals nurse associates will be allowed to give patients drugs unsupervised
  Nursing associates will be expected to calculate drug doses and independently administer controlled medications, leaked documents have revealed.
• New hospital chain being developed
  Three board members from South Warwickshire Foundation Trust are being appointed to run Wye Valley Trust in the first move towards creating a hospital chain, HSJ can reveal.
• ‘No evidence of harm’ from delayed ambulance response policy
  A review into an ambulance trust’s controversial policy to deliberately delay responses to some emergency calls has found no definitive evidence of patient harm.
• New capital funding regime for STPs
  NHS organisations that sell surplus land may be able to retain the capital receipts generated to invest in new services, rather than surrender them to central government.

Statistics

• Critical care bed capacity and cancelled urgent operations for September 2016