Lack of vaccination, awareness worsen UK flu season
Filed under: Europe, Government, Hot Health Headline, Public health
The Guardian’s Denis Campbell and Sarah Boseley report that a drop in vaccination rates and a lack of public awareness has made this flu season worse than it should have been, and that there is potential for the NHS to be “inundated” with flu cases. The story has spread quickly in the UK, and may be providing just the sort of public awareness campaign that the reporters found was previously lacking.
Professor Steve Field, who until last month was the chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, spoke out as the Department of Health revealed there are more than 300 people in critical care beds with flu and 17 people have died.
Field said the decision not to encourage the public to have a jab to protect themselves was “ill-advised” and needed to be urgently reversed.
The NHS should have acted more decisively to encourage people to have the jab because it was known that H1N1 swine flu was still circulating and that few NHS staff had the swine flu vaccine when it was offered to them late last year.
Related
For more European health news, see AHCJ’s Covering Europe initiative.
UK hospitals fail to comply with safety alerts
Filed under: Europe, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline
Following medical errors and patient safety issues, the United Kingdom’s National Patient Safety Agency issues national safety alerts so that hospitals can change their practices and avoid repeat occurrences. As The Daily Telegraph’s Rebecca Smith reports, a patient advocacy group has found (28-page PDF) that two-thirds of UK hospitals have failed to meet the implementation deadline on at least one alert.
The group blames haphazard enforcement and monitoring for the lapses.
Action against Medical Accidents warned that despite repeated warnings that the alerts were not being complied with, there was no central policy or guidance on which organisation should be monitoring compliance and what action should be taken.
Smith focused on two particularly serious issues, the inappropriate administration of oxygen and injectable medicines. The report groups instances of noncompliance by hospital and by alert.
How the NHS muzzles U.K. whistle-blowers
Victoria Macdonald of Britain’s Channel 4 News, with the help of the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, used FOIA requests to expose the National Health Services’ habit of using “gagging clauses” and financial settlements to silence whistle-blowers.
In a number of requests made under the Freedom of Information Act we discovered that over the past decade 170 doctors signed a settlement, or compromise, agreement with their trust. We were given 64 heavily redacted contracts to review. Of those 55 - that is nearly 90 per cent - contained gagging clauses.
…
Under another FOI we asked all 225 hospital trusts in England how much they had spent on settlement agreements over the past decade. Of those who responded, only 71 trusts admitted to entering into these agreements, 40 revealed they had spent a total of £3m. In one case, a doctor was paid a quarter of a million pounds. However, a further 31 trusts simply refused to tell us how much they had paid out.
While not every settlement was designed to muzzle a whistle-blower, a significant portion were, Macdonald found. The effort has created what she found was a “culture of fear,” yet there are no plans to revise the relevant laws.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, by the way, is a new not-for-profit with a £2 million ($3.2 million) grant to support long-term investigations at British newspapers.
Reports reveal problems in England’s NHS
England’s Care Quality Commission, a regulatory agency, has found that a quarter of the National Health Services hospital trusts fail to meet basic standards of hygiene, according to The Telegraph’s Andrew Hough.
Some of the failures included 36 trusts not providing areas to decontaminate instruments, three trusts failing to regularly flush unused water outlets while more than a dozen trusts failed to keep clinical areas clean.
As Hough reports, the revelations come just days after a BBC investigation found that hospital trusts have given incorrect information on their performance and quality of care.
Related
Conflicting demands on their job and being rushed or understaffed were common problems revealed by a recent survey of employees of England’s National Health System, as The Telegraph’s Rebecca Smith reports.
The NHS, according to its Web site is “the world’s largest publicly funded health service” with more than 1.7 million employees. The survey was done by the Care Quality Commission.
The CQC reports some improvements in job satisfaction, however:
Approximately half of all staff would recommend their trust as a place to work, and just under two thirds are happy with the standard of care provided by their trust. There has also been a substantial rise in the % of staff saying that they have had training in infection control.
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