The road to recovery: Delivering financial sustainability in the NHS – PWC 
Common solutions to tackling financial challenges identified by PWC through working closely with the NHS leadership teams.

• Get the right leadership in place. Strong organisations recognise they need people with the capability, time and commitment to lead and deliver financial recovery programmes, while also improving operational performance and quality of care.
• Find the underlying causes of financial challenges, share these widely and gain buy in to these factors before acting on them.
• Get discretionary spending under control, gripping the organisation firmly.
• Build a credible and easy recovery plan that acts quickly to stop the situation getting worse and improves things in the short and medium term while also understanding what needs to happen to make the change sustainable in the long term.
• Communicate clearly to staff about what they need to do to change things.

Government has ‘no choice’ but to spend on hospitals – NHE
The government must urgently put more funds into hospitals in the Autumn Budget, a new study has suggested. The Autumn 2017 Performance Tracker, created by the Institute for Government (IfG) and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), analysed central government spending across nine sectors. Despite the…

MPs to consider doubling penalty for NHS worker assault – NHE
A Private Members’ Bill which would increase sentences for people found guilty of assaults on emergency workers will be discussed on Friday. The bill – proposed by Labour MP Chris Bryant – would double the maximum punishment for this type of assault to two years. The proposal has already received government backing…

Data scandal worsens as NHS loses further 162,000 key patient files – NHE
Revelations that the NHS lost more than half a million patient files have been deepened with the reveal of a further 162,000 pieces of paperwork also missing. The information was discovered as part of a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) inquiry into the reported handling of patient data by NHS Share Business Services (SBS). The 162,000…

Response to new childhood overweight and obesity statistics – The King’s Fund
The King’s Fund has responded to the National Child Measurement Programme data for England for 2016/17, which has found that over a quarter of reception children were overweight or obese. David Buck, Senior Fellow in Public Health and Inequalities at The King’s Fund, said: ‘The government needs to demonstrate its commitment to children’s health by setting out a stronger strategy for how it and others can reduce the percentage of children who are overweight and obese. While progress on reducing the amount of sugar in soft drinks has been a welcome step forward, these are problems where a ‘pick-and-mix’ approach to policies is nowhere near enough to address one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.

The NHS and the public: a historical perspective – The King’s Fund Blog
The Britain that sees the NHS approach its 70th anniversary is a very different place to that which welcomed a new National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. Any effort to analyse the relationship between the public and the NHS needs to take this into account.

How does the NHS in England work? An alternative guide  – The King’s Fund
An animation giving a whistle-stop tour of how the NHS works in 2017 and how it is changing.

How does the NHS work? A never-ending story – The King’s Fund Blog
‘Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.’ So said Donald Trump earlier this year as he set out to overhaul Barack Obama’s signature health care policy, the Affordable Care Act. It may have come as a surprise to the US President, but those working in health policy across the globe have long been aware of the complexities of providing health care for millions of people in a way that is efficient, safe and equitable. In England, the array of different organisations that make up the health service and the way they do (or don’t) work together can be baffling, even for those who work in the NHS.

HSJ Roundup (contact the Library for further details)

• Peter Homa reveals next NHS role 
  Veteran NHS trust chief executive Peter Homa will become the first chair of the NHS Leadership Academy next month.
• Former success regime and SHA boss to lead troubled STP 
  The former chair of the North Cumbria success regime has been appointed to chair an STP going through the national capped expenditure process, HSJ has learned.
• Chief officer leaves financially challenged CCG 
  North Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group chief officer Liane Langdon is stepping down from the role.
• Major teaching trust orders second ‘hidden waiters’ review 
  A large teaching hospital has ordered its second review of waiting lists in a year after another cohort of patients were found to be missing from records.
• Burnham: Reconfiguration took focus ‘away from where it should have been’
  Andy Burnham says health leaders in Greater Manchester should reflect on the much heralded reconfiguration of hospital services in the region, saying it “took time, energy and focus away from where it should have been”.

Our Fabulous NHS – Academy of Fabulous Stuff
***Get involved*** –  share your fab stuff!

• Specialist clinics for those with musculo-skeletal conditions in South Cumbria becomes permanent A new service for patients referred to the orthopaedic service – where they see a physiotherapist in special clinics rather than a consultant surgeon – has become permanent after an eight month trial period. In the integrated musculo-skeletal (iMSK) service (a collaboration of different health providers and commissioners across the area including University Hospitals of […]
• NAViGO Health and Social Care CIC wins innovation award to improve quality of health care The Performance Team from NAVIGO Health and Social Care CIC has been selected by the Health Foundation, an independent health and health care charity, to be part of its £1.5 million innovation programme ‘Innovating for Improvement’. The sixth round of the Innovating for Improvement programme is supporting 21 health care projects across the UK with […]