Care Quality Commission says performance at 44 out of 161 acute hospital trusts in England is cause for concern
Accident and emergency
One in four NHShospitals is a cause for concern over the quality or safety of the care it provides to patients, the service’s statutory watchdog has warned.
In an analysis of all 161 acute hospital trusts in England that is the most comprehensive ever carried out, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) says it is worried about aspects of care at 44 (27.3%) of them.
Performance in some areas is so inadequate that it poses a risk or an elevated risk to patients.
The sheer number of hospitals about which the regulator is concerned dwarfs the 14 trusts that Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS’s medical director, investigated earlier this year. Eleven of those 14 were put into special measures as a result of inadequacies he uncovered.
Doctors say prime minister’s pledge is unachievable, as analysis shows only 1% of surgeries open all weekend
Dr Clare Gerada, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs said: ‘you do not find a solution by beating us around the head constantly, but by supporting and investing in us.’ Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian
Senior doctors have condemned the prime minister’s pledge that GP surgeries will open from 8am to 8pm seven days a week as unrealistic and unachievable, as a Guardian analysis of existing opening times showed that just 1% of practices see patients on both weekend days and three-quarters are shut all weekend.
Only 100 (1%) of the 9,871 surgeries in England listed on the NHS Choices website are currently open for part of Saturday and part of Sunday, while overall just one in seven – 1,439 (14.6%) – open at all on a Saturday.
Those that are open offer access to a GP for on average only three hours and 25 minutes, far less than during an 8am to 6.30pm standard weekday. Three out of four (7,561 – 75.6%) surgeries are shut all weekend.
Even at surgeries that do see patients at the weekend, opening hours can be brief. Although four practices in Sheffield, Coventry, Wirral and King’s Lynn open for 14 hours on a Saturday, the Village Hall surgery in Nottingham is open for just 30 minutes that day. More than 30 others open for an hour or less.
The findings underline the scale of the task David Cameron faces in honouring his promise, which earned widespread media coverage when he announced it at the Tory conference. Millions who find it hard to see a GP at a suitable time would benefit from the dramatic extension of opening hours, he pledged: “We want to support GPs to modernise their services so they can see patients from 8am to 8pm, seven days a week.”
But doctors’ leaders claim there are far too few GPs to staff such an expansion of opening times and the NHS is too cash-strapped to afford it. They have also questioned whether enough patients will want to see a GP outside normal weekday surgery hours, especially at weekends, to justify the move.
Family doctors’ organisations warn that a large majority of patients who visit surgeries during usual weekday opening hours could face longer waiting times and not be able to see their regular GP if ministers press ahead with the plan.
The mental health service in England is in crisis and unsafe, says one of the country’s leading psychiatrists.
Dr Martin Baggaley, medical director of the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, spoke out as an investigation by BBC News and Community Care magazine reveals more than 1,500 mental health beds have closed in recent years.
Many trusts have all their beds filled.
…
Freedom of Information requests were sent to 53 of England’s 58 mental health trusts, by BBC News and Community Care, and 46 trusts replied.
The figures show that a minimum of 1,711 mental health beds have been closed since April 2011, including 277 between April and August 2013.
This represents a 9% reduction in the total number of mental health beds – 18,924 – available in 2011/12.
…
On the morning Dr Baggaley spoke to the BBC, he said a severely distressed patient had been transferred from Croydon to Hertfordshire as there were no beds in London.
He has 50 patients in beds outside his trust, some as far away as Somerset.
He said: “We are in a real crisis at the moment. I think currently the system is inefficient, unsafe.
“We’re certainly feeling it on the front line, it’s very pressured, and we spend a lot of our time struggling to find beds, sending people across the country which is really not what I want to do.”
Problems revealed by the medical director for the NHS in the capital are a symptom of country-wide issues, he says
The medical director of the NHS for the capital has warned that services are at “breaking point” and that patients are unsafe.
Dr Andy Mitchell has said that London’s health system is “unsustainable” the day before NHS England will publish a report stating that it can no longer afford to staff all of its hospitals at safe levels.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Dr Mitchell stated that the public must face up to the reality that hospitals are overstretched and that patients receive an inadequate service.
“They don’t understand how watered down these services are. What we cannot do is carry on with the idea that all hospitals provide a whole range of services. That is completely unsustainable and would become, frankly, unsafe, and is becoming unsafe in many areas.
“The public isn’t really sufficiently aware, that many places don’t meet acceptable standards of care. The expectation is that, as they walk into hospital, they get high-quality service, and in fact, they don’t in many places,” he said.
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Unions laid into Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday for wanting to ditch a miserly 1 per cent pay increase for hard-working NHS staff.
The GMB accused him of “berating and bullying staff” and said that his behaviour “will not be tolerated,” warning that industrial action was possible.
Unite called for the introduction of the living wage to benefit the NHS’s 17,000 lowest-paid workers.
Mr Hunt caused a huge furore when he said that the independent NHS pay review body should not implement a one per cent increase for 1.3 million NHS staff, or maintain performance-related increments.
Pointing out that the NHS pay review body was independent, GMB’s national NHS officer Rehana Azam said: “You only have to spend time with a paramedic, nurse, theatre porter or any other frontline NHS worker to see their number one priority is to deliver quality care and the best outcomes to patients they care for.”
“Why then does Jeremy Hunt want to berate and bully staff while they are trying to do a good job often under difficult circumstances?”
