Duty of candour: guidance for surgeons and employers
Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) -This best practice guide describes how to implement the principles of duty of candour in everyday practice. It outlines steps that surgeons should take on an individual level, to ensure that the principles of the duty of candour are at the forefront of everyday work. It reflects the profession’s commitment towards creating greater openness and transparency in the NHS. This guide is being released following the coming into force of the Duty of Candour legislation in late November 2014 and its amendments in April 2015. It expands on the principles of the College’s Good S...
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - April 22, 2015 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Workforce and employment Source Type: blogs
ACCME Names Graham T. McMahon, MD, MMSc, as New President and CEO Beginning April 2015
The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) Board of Directors today announced that it has chosen Graham T. McMahon, MD, MMSc, as the new President and CEO. The Board chose Dr. McMahon unanimously, and he will begin his tenure in April 2015, following the retirement of Murray Kopelow, MD, the current President and CEO of ACCME.
According to the ACCME Press Release, Dr. Kopelow will continue to lead the ACCME during the transition period and will work with the Board of Directors and Dr. McMahon until July 31, 2015, to ensure a smooth leadership transition process.
“At the time of h...
Source: Policy and Medicine - January 12, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan Source Type: blogs
The Saatchi bill won’t find a cure for cancer, but it will encourage charlatans
Jump to follow-up
Maurice Nathan Saatchi, Baron Saatchi is an advertising man who, with his brother, Charles Saatchi ("‘why tell the truth when a good lie will do?), became very rich by advertising cigarettes and the Conservative party. After his second wife died of cancer he introduced a private members bill in the House of Lords in 2012. The Medical Innovation Bill came back to the Lords for its second reading on 24 October 2014.
The debate was deeply depressing: very pompous and mostly totally uninformed. You would never have guessed that the vast majority of those who understand the problem are a...
Source: DC's goodscience - October 24, 2014 Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: business CAM cancer Cancer act Saatchi Bill alternative medicine antiscience badscience Source Type: blogs
The Saatchi bill won’t find a cure for cancer, but it will encourage charlatans
Jump to follow-up
Maurice Nathan Saatchi, Baron Saatchi is an advertising man who, with his brother, Charles Saatchi ("‘why tell the truth when a good lie will do?), became very rich by advertising cigarettes and the Conservative party. After his second wife died of cancer he introduced a private members bill in the House of Lords in 2012. The Medical Innovation Bill came back to the Lords for its second reading on 24 October 2014.
The debate was deeply depressing: very pompous and mostly totally uninformed. You would never have guessed that the vast majority of those who understand the problem are a...
Source: DC's goodscience - October 24, 2014 Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: business CAM cancer Cancer act Saatchi Bill alternative medicine antiscience badscience Source Type: blogs
Co-ordinated care survey findings
This report details the results of a survey of RCS members and patients looking into the coordination of care including discharge processes and re-admission for surgical patients in England and Wales. Overall, the results showed that discharge from hospital is an area of particular concern with only one quarter of those surveyed agreeing that there is a thorough coordinated discharge process in place to enable effective transfer of care from the hospital environment. It makes a number of recommendations for where the integration of care for patients can be improved including calling for greater discharge planning to take p...
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - September 29, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Integrated care Patient involvement, experience and feedback Quality of care and clinical outcomes Source Type: blogs
Emergency surgery policy briefing
Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) - This briefing sets out the main challenges facing emergency surgery, and the high-level actions the Government and other policy-makers can take to support patients who require emergency surgical care. It highlights concerns about variations in mortality rates following emergency surgery and argues for clearer protocols and standards on how patients undergoing emergency surgery should be treated and for the NHS to measure outcomes for patients much more rigorously by publishing audits.
Briefing
Press release (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - September 23, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: NHS measurement and performance Patient safety Quality of care and clinical outcomes Source Type: blogs
Good surgical practice
Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) - This guidance outlines the standards of practice that are expected of all surgeons as well as the skills, values and attitudes that underpin the profession and has been developed with surgeons and patient groups. It highlights surgical leadership and teamwork as crucial for achieving high-quality patient care and provides surgeons with a model that they should aspire to in day to day practice.
Guidance
RCS news (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - August 29, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Leadership and leadership development Patient safety Quality of care and clinical outcomes Regulation, governance and accountability Source Type: blogs
Is access to surgery a postcode lottery?
This report warns that many CCGs are ignoring clinical evidence in their surgical commissioning policies, leading to some patients are facing long delays for surgical treatment. The study investigated commissioning policies relating to four common surgical procedures carried out on the NHS and compared those policies to evidence-based guidance published by The Royal College of Surgeons, the surgical specialty associations and NICE.
Report
RCS news (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - July 15, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Commissioning Quality of care and clinical outcomes Source Type: blogs
Commissioning guide: provision of general children’s surgery
Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) - This commissioning guidance does not focus on single-condition care pathways, but covers the provision of treatment for the wide range of children’s conditions that may require elective surgical intervention and/or anaesthesia for planned procedures and investigations.
Guidance
RCS - publications (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - April 23, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Commissioning Source Type: blogs
From innovation to adoption: successfully spreading surgical innovation
This report warns that failure to adopt new surgical techniques quickly into everyday clinical practice means NHS patients are missing out on ground-breaking new procedures. It sets out the factors that have helped and hindered the adoption of new surgical techniques in England and seeks to address how to progress the uptake of surgical innovations in a practical way, eradicating delay to ensure their benefits are realised by patients as quickly as possible.
Report
Press release (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - April 14, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: New technologies Quality of care and clinical outcomes Source Type: blogs
The implementation of the Working Time Directive, and its impact on the NHS and health professionals
This report finds that the implementation of the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) in the NHS has had an adverse impact on the training in certain medical specialities, including surgeons and doctors working in acute medicine. The report was commissioned by the government in response to concerns it had about the impact of the directive on patient care and doctors’ learning. The taskforce found that although some groups of doctors are able to receive the training they need within the 48-hour week, this is very challenging for others.
Report
Royal College of Surgeons - news (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - April 3, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Workforce and employment Source Type: blogs
Commissioning guide: weight assessment and management clinics (tier 3)
The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) -The guide is intended to assist clinical commissioning groups in commissioning these services and reduce variation in access to weight-loss clinics across the country.
Commissioning guide
RCS - news (Source: Health Management Specialist Library)
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - March 20, 2014 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Knowledge Service Tags: Commissioning Source Type: blogs
Coming soon to a hospital near you
In case you were (still) wondering about how the ObamaTax would affect your health care, well:"The Royal College of Surgeons wrote to healthcare inspectors last year warning of “grave concerns” that too many people were dying in the south of the country because of long waits for heart surgery."No, not Mississippi or Alabama (yet), but the quaint subset of Great Britain called Wales (soon to be Wails?). Turns out that there are (at least) "150 cases in which patients died waiting for life-saving treatment." All part of the grand scheme we call the Much Vaunted National Health System©.But hey, at least it's "free," righ...
Source: InsureBlog - February 24, 2014 Category: Medical Lawyers and Insurers Source Type: blogs
Quality vs Costs of US Corporate Owned but Offshore Medical Schools
Background: Off-Shore Medical Schools for US Students Owned by US Corporations While US health care appears to be more corporate than health care in any other developed country, one part of health care that has remained a bit less corporate is medical education. In particular, no US medical school is a for-profit venture, to my knowledge. (This just makes US medical education a bit less corporate than the rest of health care because, as we have discussed endlessly, academic medical institutions in the country have frequent institutional conflicts of interest, and their boards of trustees, administration, and fa...
Source: Health Care Renewal - September 13, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: medical schools Ross University DeVry Inc off shore medical schools Source Type: blogs
Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust public inquiry
This report is the result of a public inquiry into the commissioning,
supervisory and regulatory bodies in the monitoring of Mid
Staffordshire hospital between January 2005 and March 2009. Following
the earlier NHS inquiry in 2010, this report considers why the serious
problems at the trust were not identified and acted on sooner, and
identifies important lessons to be learnt for the future of patient
care. It makes 290 recommendations designed to change the culture of
care in the NHS; strengthen leadership; and improve openness and
transparency.
Final report
Press release
Further reading
The King's Fund - ...
Source: Health Management Specialist Library - February 7, 2013 Category: UK Health Authors: The King's Fund Information & Library Service Source Type: blogs
