Category: NHS

Health and Social Care in England

Tackling the myths

Source: The King’s Fund

The health and care system is under intense pressure, with rising waiting times, persistent workforce shortages and patients struggling to access the care they need. As a result, patient and public satisfaction with services has dropped significantly, prompting debate and discussion about the future of health and care services. In the context of what can feel like a heated political and media discussion, the King’s Fund have taken five myths that sometimes feature in this debate and debunked them.

Read the article here.

Disabled people and health care services

Getting our voices heard

Disabled people face poorer experiences of – and worse access to – health and care services than people who aren’t disabled and these health inequalities have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this context, it’s vitally important to include disabled people in planning, designing and developing health and care services. This King’s Fund long read, with Disability Rights UK sets out what we found out about how disabled people are currently involved in health and care service design, and what good might look like.

Key messages include:

  • 60 per cent of those who died from Covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic were disabled. The health inequalities disabled people already faced were made worse by the pandemic and a decade of austerity. In this context, it’s vitally important to include disabled people in designing and planning health and care system responses.
  • Health and care services need to understand the broad diversity of disabled people’s identities and experiences, and adopt a social model approach to disability, understanding that people are disabled by barriers in society, rather than by impairments or health conditions.
  • Health and care professionals need to value disabled people’s expertise through properly recognising the value of lived experience and ensure disabled people’s voices are central to any plans right from the start.
  • Disabled health and care staff are potential partners in this work, with their perspectives of both using and delivering services.
  • Disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) can strengthen their impact by working with other local DPOs and user-led organisations, understanding which parts of health and care systems they can best influence, and supporting health and care organisations to meaningfully engage with disabled people.
  • Both health and care organisations and DPOs need to improve their understanding of how people’s multiple identities shape their experiences, and embrace diversity of voices, opinions and challenges as an opportunity to think differently.
  • Ensuring disabled people’s voices are heard requires constant attention. While there are some examples of good practice, we heard many stories we heard where involvement wasn’t happening or felt tokenistic.

(The King’s Fund)

King’s Fund Podcast

Deep roots: place and trust with Professor Carolyn Wilkins OBE

How can local government and the NHS work together to cultivate a sense of place? Listen to Professor Carolyn Wilkins OBE talk about leadership and influence across local, regional and national levels.

Covid 19 and Mental Health

The parallel pandemic

Source: Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) and NIHR

This report, produced together with the northern National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaborations (NIHR ARCs), shows that a parallel pandemic of mental ill health has hit the north of England with a £2 billion cost to the country at the same time as the Covid-19 pandemic. Mental health in England was hit badly over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. But people in the north performed significantly worse in their mental health outcomes compared to those in the rest of the country.

A community-powered NHS

Making prevention a reality

Source: The King’s Fund

This report finds that by moving towards community-powered health –working collaboratively with communities as equal partners in the design and delivery of health care – can help make prevention a reality, protect the NHS’s future and improve health for all.

The Health Foundation

NHS Workforce Projections 2022

Source: The King’s Fund

This analysis shows that the NHS in England could face a shortfall of around 38,000 full time equivalent (FTE) registered nurses by 2023/24 relative to the numbers needed to deliver pre-pandemic levels of care. This is despite the expectation that the government could meet its own target of recruiting an additional 50,000 FTE registered NHS nurses by the end of the parliament. It argues that the government needs to acknowledge the growing demand for care driven by an ageing population and an increased number of people with complex health conditions. It also explores potential gaps in the nursing workforce over a longer time period beyond the next election.

NHS Pension Scheme

Proposed uplifts to the member contribution tier thresholds

Further to the consultation NHS Pension Scheme: proposed changes to member contributions from 1 April 2022 and the associated regulations, this consultation document sets out how the pensionable earnings thresholds in the member contribution structure will be uplifted to account for the Agenda for Change pay increase. The consultation document also includes part of a table that was omitted from the regulations, and the draft regulations contain technical amendment to correct this omission. The closing date for comments is 12 August 2022.

Allied Health Professionals

Current Updates

The Allied Health Professions (AHPs) strategy for England 2022-2027 – AHPs Deliver.
NHS England; 2022.

(This new strategy is for the whole Allied Health Profession (AHP) community: support workers, assistant practitioners, registered professionals, pre-registration apprentices and students. It is inclusive and reflects how AHPs work in multidisciplinary teams, so that those who identify as part of the AHP community working in a variety of health and care sectors can use it to continually improve and redesign services.)

Chief allied health professionals handbook.
NHS England; 2022.

(A guide for chief allied health professionals, aspiring chief allied health professionals and trust boards.)

Allied health professionals within integrated care systems: guidance for system executives and senior leaders.
NHS England; 2022.

(This document provides an overview of: the AHP system architecture required to ensure AHP operational delivery; AHP leadership of this architecture; an AHP quality framework to support AHP workforce transformation)

NHS Key Statistics: England

June 2022

Source: House of Commons Library; 2022.

A summary of NHS demand, performance, backlogs, and capacity of services in England. It covers A&E statistics, waiting lists and pressures, ambulance data, delayed discharges, staffing levels including doctors and nurses, and more.

Take a look here: NHS Key Statistics: England, June 2022 – House of Commons Library (parliament.uk)

Was the NHS overwhelmed last winter?

Nuffield Trust

Throughout the pandemic, politicians and other policy-makers have emphasised the need to protect the NHS from collapse or overwhelm but even before Covid-19, the health service struggled to stay above water given worsening capacity, staffing and demand issues, especially during the colder months. This briefing looks at what happened to urgent and emergency hospital care last winter, when another wave of the virus hit the country during a time when it would be stretched to its absolute limits even without a pandemic.