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19.02.10                                                                                 How can you help the PA? Click here

Welcome to all of our new members and E-members

Following the recent successful West Midlands focus group looking at the image of nursing in the region, we will also be holding a focus group on the same theme in the London region. We hope to have focus groups in other regions over the course of the year. Meeting dates and times are still to be confirmed, but if you are interested in attending please let us know by emailing events@patients-association.com

As previously advertised, as well as providing news the Weekly News Round Up will be developing to include other features. This week see's the first of the Jargon Buster articles, helping you to get to grips with aspects of healthcare that you might not have come across before. The first Jargon Buster will be looking at Cochrane reviews, as featured in the story about the flu jab 

 This week...

1.    NHS Hospital Exports Drugs to Europe

2.    Care funding row continues

3.    Patients Kept in Store Cupboard/Treatment Rooms at Norfolk and Norwich Hospital

4.    Steele Review Dentistry Pilot Service for Patients

5.    Cochrane Systematic Review finds Flu-jab may be Futile in some agre groups

Jargon buster: Cochrane review

1. NHS Hospital Exports Drugs to Europe

 
The Health Service Journal reported this week that the Royal Surrey County Hospital has been selling drugs bought at NHS negotiated prices to wholesale exporters for considerable profit.

The Royal Surrey County Hospital was estimated to have earned £4.6 million in 2009/2010, with at least £300,000 (6% margin) of that being profit. The hospital has been criticised by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society who claimed that patients may be being put at risk by the situation. Howard Stokoe, the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency’s principle pharmacist said “that if the practice persisted pharmaceutical companies might regard onward sales for profit as an abuse of the NHS pricing agreement – jeopardising future negotiations for NHS discounts.”

A spokesperson for the Trust insisted that at no time were drugs that were in short supply sold but refused to disclose which drugs had been traded.  Mike O’Brien the Minister for Health branded the trust as “unscrupulous” and accused the trust of “putting patients’ health at risk by selling drugs intended for UK patients for higher prices abroad.”

The Trust is reported to have sold NHS medicines for a period of ten months. The Trust has admitted that they stopped the practice in January 2010 approximately 6 months after the Department of Health made clear that trading in NHS medicines was “wholly unacceptable” and a practice that threatened the supply of medicines and patient care.

In response to these concerns PA Director Katherine Murphy said “This is very serious. All Trusts were given clear instructions not to participate in this practice but the management at Royal Surrey ignored that warning. There should be an immediate investigation into what has happened. The Trust should have to explain why they thought they could ignore the clear instructions and we should get independent verification that they haven’t jeopardized patient care. We sincerely hope additional financial pressures associated with Foundation Trust status had nothing to do with what’s happened.”

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2. Care funding row continues

 The political row over the funding of care for the elderly continues with the Conservative Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley MP refusing to attend a cross-party conference on social care after calling it a “political ploy” by the Labour party.

Mr Lansley, along with Health Secretary Andy Burnham and Lib Dem Health spokesman Norman Lamb, took part in an often heated debate on the issue on the BBC’s “Politics Show” last Sunday.

The Health Secretary strongly denied Conservative claims that the government plans to impose a £20,000 “death tax” to fund social care, accusing the Tories of “not being straight with people on this” and “going for a very aggressive form of advertising” in reference to a new series of Conservative posters featuring a gravestone and the statement “now Gordon wants £20,000 when you die”.

The government’s “Voice of Older People”, Dame Joan Bakewell, said that “this flurry of political point scoring is just getting in the way” and that it was unlikely that there would be a new policy “written in stone within a few weeks”.

A letter to The Times signed by eighteen charities echoed a similar sentiment calling on political parties not to reduce a complex and serious issue to “poster slogans” and “election soundbites”. Signatories included Carers UK, the National Care Forum, the Alzheimer’s Society, Macmillan Cancer Support, Age Concern and Help the Aged.

The cross party conference, held at the Department of Health’s London headquarters, is being attended by various charities and the government is hopeful of achieving cross party support for a specific plan to publish in a white paper in March

This comes as the Audit Commission predicts that the £9 billion a year spent by Councils on social care will double by 2026 even if the current system continues unchanged. 

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3. Patients Kept in Store Cupboard/Treatment Rooms at Norfolk and Norwich Hospital

  It has emerged that Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital used store cupboards as treatment rooms. It has recently been reported that at least three Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital patients spent one or two nights in one of the hospital’s 27 “treatment rooms”. 

A spokesperson for Norwich Hospital stated that treatment rooms were only used when there were “exceptionally high levels of emergency admissions” and were used strictly on a short-term basis. Norman Lamb the Shadow Health Secretary for the Liberal Democrats described use of yhe rooms as unacceptable. Reports from the three patients moved to the store cupboard described missed meals, sleepless nights due to continuous interruptions from nurses obtaining medical supplies but more alarmingly being surrounded by blood stained bins, bandages and dirty needles.
 
Katherine Murphy, Director of the Patients Association said “it was not unusual for patients to find themselves in such conditions and this is not the worst example we have heard of. It’s concerning. It’s so undignified. Families shouldn’t put up with it.”

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4. Steele Review dentistry pilot service for patients

Lat year the Steele Review recommended changes to the dental contract which it was hoped would improve services for patients. Now the Chief Dental Officer, Barry Cockcroft, has announced members of the board to oversee the implementation of the recommendations. Professor Jimmy Steele, who led the Independent Review of NHS Dental Services, has joined the implementation board alongside the Chief Dental Officer and John Milne, Chair of the General Dental Practice Committee who are also members of the board.

The Review's recommendations covered oral health improvements and increased access in June 2009. Primary Care Trusts and dentists will be invited to pilot new service delivery methods focusing on patient outcomes. The pilots will look at a range of issues, including:

• increasing access to NHS dentists
• introducing patient registration
• measuring quality as well as quantity of treatment; and
• encouraging dentists to carry out more preventative work.

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5. Cochrane Systematic Review finds Flu-jab may be Futile

Whilst there was no widespread call for the withdrawal of the vaccine for this agre group, this week the Cochrane Reviews of Prevention and Treatment of Influenza has reported that after conducting research on a total of 75 scientific studies it found very limited evidence to support vaccination of people aged over 65 in order to fight against the influenza virus.

For the part 40 years the flu-jab has been recommended for the over 65s in order to prevent influenza in older people. Older people are at greater risk of developing influenza and they also have an increased risk of associated complications, hospitalisation and death as their immune systems are less able to fight against the flu virus.

Tom Jefferson, MD of the Cochrane Collaboration in Rome said “The available evidence is of poor quality and provides no guidance regarding the safety, or effectiveness of influenza in people aged over 65 years or over. To resolve the uncertainty, an adequately powered publicly funded randomised, placebo-controlled trial run over several seasons should be undertaken.”

As many as 12,000 people in the UK die from the flu or a ‘flu-like illness’ each year. The Government routinely offers a seasonal flu-jab to all people aged over the age of 65. Approximately 6 million people, in the region of three quarters of the overall over 65s population receive the flu-jab at an estimated annual cost of £110 million. The Department of Health are currently considering extending the flu-jab to other categories of people, including pregnant women and children whose immune systems are less able to cope with flu-viruses. Such action may be considered financially reckless and largely futile in light of the findings of the Cochrane Review.

The Department of Health has recognised that the evidence supporting the effective combat of the flu through vaccination in the over 65s is “sparing” but considers the policy of offering the flu-jab to people aged over the age of 65 and other vulnerable categories of people best practice.

To read more about the Cochrane Reviews of Prevention and Treatment of Influenza please clink the link below:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/mrwhome/106568753/influenza.html

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Jargon buster: Cochrane Review

Does this treatment work? Increasingly this is the question patients want answered. There are websites around the world offering answers, but can patients rely on them? For some years, the Cochrane Library has been rightly praised for its independent analysis of medical trials worldwide. Any patient may access it at:

http://www.cochrane.co.uk/en/clib.html 

and just click on Cochrane Library and Cochrane Consumer Network.

Cochrane reviews look at lots of other smaller studies and  combine the results to make the evidenceas reliable as possible. By adding the results of lots of smaller studies the reviews can try and see what effect a treatment has had on massive populations of patients.

On St. David's Day, Monday 1st March Cochrane are organising a Consumer Event in Cardiff. The event is completely free and includes lunch on arrival. Topics discussed in the workshop will include the importance of using the best evidence for informed decision making and how consumers/heath service users and the public can contribute to the production of Cochrane systematic reviews.

To find out more about Consumers in Cochrane please visit:

http://cochrane.org/consumers/homepage.htm

For more information or to register please contact Maria mburgess@cochrane.ac.uk 

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