Archive for May, 2009

Trusting the NHS to handle your information

How many people do you want or trust to see your medical records? The latest report from the PEC meeting on 19 May discusses the best way to make the public trust the NHS as a good handler of confidential data with a programme of gradual introduction where the benefits of sharing this information are clearest such as urgent care in A&E or specialist and community nursing.

Understandable Score Cards

The PCT has for the first time rated the performance of all primary care practices in Wandsworth against a range of indicators. These will be designed to be understood and used by patients and public to help them for example make a choice of GP practice if they are moving to the area or wanting to move practice. A customer-friendly version of the comparative table will be published and publicised later this year.

Other Topics

• How to make better use of Health Visitors
• South Wandsworth Consultation
• Chlamydia Screening

Andrew Craig’s report representing as ever his views only and not those of the PEC or the NHS Wandsworth can be seen on our site here. The papers of the actual meeting can be seen on the Wandsworth NHS website

Clapham Junction will see a new health centre open in early 2010. The centre is one of the 150 new GP-led health centres in England to provide GP services from 8am to 8pm 7 days a week. The services will be available both on a pre-booked and walk-in basis and will offer up to 6000 new patients the opportunity to register.

For more information on what this all means for Wandsworth people and answers to your questions, see the Q&A paper.

Jeremy Ambache Wandsworth LINk Chair  gives his personal view of the PCT Board meeting held on 6th May 2009. These notes are not necessarily the official LINk view.

Jeremy covered this meeting for Roger Appleton who is the regular LINk representative on the PCT Board as Roger was not able to attend. There were some 28 agenda items and this note is a summary of some of the main issues.

1. FINANCE PAPERS. The outturn revenue expenditure for 08-09 was on target and this gave an under-spend of nearly £4m. A budget increase of over 5% is expected in the current year, but the outlook for future years is expected to be much poorer.
2. PERFORMANCE TARGET REPORTS. The report on achievement against target for 2008-09 shows an overall improvement on previous years and the Board was pleased with this progress. Targets that were not met and that need further improvement are: a) 4 week smoking quitters, b) drug users in effective treatment c) cancer deaths d) teenage pregnancy rates e) booking via ‘choose and book’
3. SWINE ‘FLU PREPARATIONS. We were told about the preparations for the swine ‘flu possible pandemic by the PCT and all the local health services.
4. BIDDING FOR THE SOUTH WEST LONDON COMMISSIONING UNIT. The progress made on bidding to host the South West London Commissioning team was agreed. This team will involve commissioning services for several local PCTs including for Wandsworth.
5. HEALTH VISITING AND SCHOOL NURSING REVIEW. The reviews were agreed. They recommend that Health Visitors are linked to the Integrated Children’s Centres (current 16 Centres going to 24 by 2011). School Nurses will be aligned to schools. A further review will cover school health services for children in special education.
6. SOUTH WANDSWORTH HEALTH CONSULTATION. Approval was given to consult over the primary care / polyclinic proposals for South Wandsworth. This consultation will start soon and finishes about 4th August but may be extended a little.
7. PRISION HEALTH DELIVERY PLAN. This was noted.
8. EXTERNALISING PROVIDER SERVICES (It is planned that the provider services of the PCT will be separated from the commissioning services which will remain within the PCT). There will be a stakeholder event on June 23rd to engage in the consideration of options.

Newsletter 13 from the LINks Exchange picks up on the Government response to the reports it commissioned after the failures of care in the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. The newsletter says
“The Government has promised to give extra support to LINks across the country including guidance for the pubic on ‘how to be heard’. There are also plans for a national publicity campaign to promote awareness of the role of LINks in influencing local decision making around NHS services.

NHS organisations are expected to publicly demonstrate that they are putting patients and the public at the heart of designing the services in their areas.

As a result, the Government will, “require relevant NHS organisations to publish a new annual statement of involvement to demonstrate how they are implementing the legal duty to involve patients and the public that came into law in November last year. We would expect the statement to include a commentary by the relevant local organisations that represent patients and the public, including the LINk and the Local Authority’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

“For acute providers, in producing their quality accounts, we would expect them to draw data from a range of sources, including direct patient feedback. We also want to ensure LINks are able to comment on quality accounts by requiring providers to consult them on their draft reports, as well as encouraging an ongoing, year round dialogue about the quality of care.”

There is also a reminder about the NCI Summer Conference on 2nd July in London to discuss the future of PPI and two blogs from different LINks on their experience of the first year. On the LINk forums, the discussion about CRB checks is still the leader with 46 posts on this topic.

Finally there are two more LINk Guides published – 18 and 19
Guide 18 is about the health and social care structures and organisations that LINks have to work with and Guide19 is addressed to health and social care managers and talks about how they should work with LINks to the benefit of their users.

Jenny Weinstein is the Executive Committee member who will be putting in the LINk comments on this new policy. She would like to hear from you this week so that the LINk views can be made in time for the Council’s Adult Care Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting in June. The deadline for comments has been extended beyond the Council’s original cut-off date of May 5th.

You can see the Council’s paper here

Your comments will reach Jenny if you send them to the LINk offices or leave them as a comment on this post

Email:
enquiries@wandsworthlink.org.uk

Telephone: 020 8696 1709

Or write to us at:

Wandsworth Care Alliance (The LINk Host)
2nd Floor Bedford House
215 Balham High Road
London SW17 7BQ

You can now see what happened at the April meeting of the Executive Committee on 20th April. The meeting covered a lot of ground and includes report-backs from the sub-groups. The minutes can be seen at on the LINk Minutes meeting page for the 20th April.

Some news on the proposals for changing health services in South Wandsworth where the consultation will run from 11th May to 4th August.

The consultation would indicate a preferred “option” …

“This option would provide three polyclinic hubs in Earlsfield, Balham and at St George’s. Each hub will serve one of the three localities. Within this option, it is the PCT’s preferred option that Brocklebank Health Centre is developed first because the population of Earlsfield has greater health needs and the Brocklebank development offers greater opportunity to provide a world class health facility.”

For those of us who are not sure what polyclinics are – the essential characteristics of a polyclinic hub are: outpatient services, urgent care, diagnostics (eg X-rays, ultrasound and phlebotomy), and extended hours. St George’s wishes to move such services off its site to make way for specialised stroke and trauma work, which would enable developing a polyclinic hub to provide them on the St George’s within the next five years, including an urgent care centre. The hubs would accommodate activity shifted from secondary care and not duplicate secondary care services.

Other issues covered in the meeting were the Children’s Nursing Review, Childhood Immunisations and the use of user and patient-based intelligence in Strategic Commissioning.

PEC and PCT Board papers are available on the NHS Wandsworth website: www.wandsworth.nhs.uk

If Wandsworth LINk members would like this feedback circulated electronically to them or other individuals or organisations, please let Andrew Craig have the details. He can be reached at andrew@agcraig.com.

Your feedback on the usefulness of the form and content of these briefings is always welcome.

Finally, please remember that this is a report from the PEC lay member’s perspective. As this report circulates widely, it is necessary to stress that it is not an official PEC or PCT document and Andrew Craig is solely responsible for its contents.

Andrew Craig writes in his capacity as the Lay Member on the PEC -

The PCT has not posted an agenda for the next Board meeting on its website. The papers are there, but no agenda. What I have done, therefore, is to list and group the papers below from the website as they relate to each other [and can be downloaded here: PCT Annotated Agenda 6th May 2009]. Under each paper or group of papers I have provided some notes as to content and what I think the relevance is (my comments are in italics to make clear that this is an opinion). These are necessarily brief notes and many of the papers are lengthy, so if you want more detail it can be found at www.wandsworth-pct.nhs.uk/news/board/boardreports.asp or you can click on one of the embedded live links in the list below.

Note that the website did not contain an Attachment 17 so we do not know if one exists or what the subject might be. There is also no chief executive’s report on the website.

The meeting will be on Wednesday 6 May 2009: 1:30pm at Balham Park Surgery,  236 Balham High Road  SW17 7AW

Jeremy Ambache Chair Wandsworth LINk wants to hear what you have to say about the top four priorities chosen by the Executive Committee at their last meeting.

Jeremy writes “We were very pleased that we received so many excellent suggestions (29 in all) as to the priorities that we should take on this year. We are sorry that we don’t have the resources to tackle them all! We have agreed the following priorities as the ones that will make the biggest impact for users of Health and Care services.

1. Improving the delivery of community services for people in their own homes after older and vulnerable people are discharged from hospital.
2. Contribute to local NHS consulations (to include: Stroke and Trauma services, Children’s Health, South Wandsworth Primary Care Services, Sexual Health)
3. Ensuring a strong service user and carer perspective to the Council’s plan to transform Care Services (to deliver more personalised care)
4. Wandsworth LINk to engage and work with service users, carers and patients and their representative groups in the borough.

If people would like give their views on these issues to us I would be most pleased to hear from them. Of course we will respond to other issues referred to us, but these are the priorities that will receive our sustained effort over the year.”

Join in with Jeremy and join the LINk – just press the ‘Have you joined yet?’ button on this page and take it from there. For more detail on the Executive’s priority setting process, see the paper discussed at the 20th April meeting.