Viv Bennett CBE

How can we make sure that people have better experiences when interacting with health systems? The main message coming through from these recommendations is how important good communication is during the health journey. #RuralHealth #RuralHealthCareers #RuralCommunitites #HealthEquity #HealthJourney

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At #19Hills we're passionate believers in the power of involving local community members in the planning & evaluation of services. The British Medical Association and The Patients Association make a strong case for engaging with patients in service planning https://lnkd.in/eJYC8Qk2 https://lnkd.in/euAhVmKE With potential benefits of better care, improved staff:patient relationships, greater trust, improved information flow, and the potential to design systems that meet needs of patient groups at risk of inequalities... ...why don't then more community services make the most of this? If https://lnkd.in/e546G-3p is right, could be lack of dedicated resources, knowledge or power dynamics. Is there a lack of belief among health professionals of the benefit of community participation? Does our healthcare culture that likely promotes the voice of doctors and health professionals above patients have an impact? What do you think? Does your service involve patient voices in how it runs? Dr Karen Sankey | Damita Abayaratne | Selvaseelan Selvarajah | Steve Laitner |

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Another Royal College of Nursing - Company forum conference that you all need to see and be aware of - 'Pain and Palliative Forum' 🤲 Martin Galligan Chair of the forum and the committee have asked me to attend to present on neuropathy - particularly with a link to diabetes. Unlock new insights in pain and palliative care! Join us for an enlightening one-day conference presented by the RCN Pain and Palliative Care Forum, specially designed for nursing professionals working across all settings and levels of practice. Immerse yourself in discussions led by leading experts as we explore the holistic assessment of pain and methods to support the needs of patients throughout their life. Learning outcomes: Recognize the impact of pain: Understand how pain affects individuals at every stage of life, particularly at the end of life. Examine the nursing role: Delve deep into the essential role nursing plays in the holistic assessment of pain and complex symptoms across various settings. Identify management strategies: Discover a variety of effective management strategies tailored for patients affected by pain and complex symptoms across diverse specialist groups. Engage in debate: Participate in lively discussion and debate to identify key opportunities for workforce development in the realm of pain and palliative care. Who Should Attend? This conference is aimed at all nursing professionals with an interest in pain and palliative care including student nurses, nursing support workers, and allied health professionals working within the NHS or independent sector. Make sure you get signed up! 🏃‍♀️ https://lnkd.in/eJVbdNq2

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I can’t read too much into Dr D. P. Singh’s FOI request to the Information Commissioner, available via What Do They Know, but their tone and approach makes me think they’re operating in good faith. Dr Singh wished to make an FOI request to the Eastern Deanery Cambridge, which they say is an NHS body. But it appears that the organisation has changed its name to ‘Workforce, Training and Education, East of England’. Dr Singh’s attempts to make a request have been unsuccessful and I don’t know why. For this reason, I’m not going to cast aspersions. However, any remotely competent attempt to make a request to ‘Workforce, Training and Education, East of England’ should have been fruitful, because whatever it was, the organisation is now part of NHS England. Given that Dr Singh is more than capable of making a coherent request to the ICO (essentially asking what gives), I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their other requests were equally clear. ‘Workforce, Training and Education, East of England’ is as valid a place to send an FOI request to NHS England as their central office. If Dr Singh made a request to them, only two answers were conceivable and only one is legally correct. I can just about imagine someone in Cambridge asking Dr Singh to make their request to NHS England’s HQ. That would have been wrong but stuff happens. But the correct response would have been for ‘Workforce, Training and Education, East of England’ to accept the request, and whatever internal jiggery-pokery was required to deliver an answer, Dr Singh did not need to know a thing about it. Whether you’re a national body or a tiny quango with two offices, I can send my request wherever I like. I can choose the less convenient destination deliberately. That’s your problem, not mine. https://lnkd.in/gxUpYgSP

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https://lnkd.in/ezSfy9hY Infrastructure and technology is crucial for better health care and staff retention, its not just a waiting list problem or overcrowded a and e the issue is deeper. what we really need to look at is how we manage to state of the art results in healthcare despite with sub-standard Infrastructure.

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Ending a day of some great conversations around primary care and cancer nursing - how do we support our primary care colleagues with increasing knowledge and awareness for general practice? What resources are available? Thanks to Macmillan Cancer Support learning hub - there are some great resources for general practice nurses.. we all have a role to play in the pathway of cancer care for patients and GPNs particularly develop strong relationships with patients over this period. Lets raise the profile and understanding of how GPNs are vital for supporting cancer care! https://lnkd.in/ecm-rVs9

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NHS England’s Frontline Digitisation programme was introduced in 2021 to support healthcare organisations and patients to have access to digital health service services and the data they need to manage and improve health and wellbeing. Many ICSs have already begun to see benefits including freeing up staff time and encouraging collaborative working with partners. The roll out of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems has forced trusts and the wider system to consider bringing clinical and administrative services together, however, transformation like this comes at a cost, and many say they are still not yet ready. In the 'Frontline digitisation: creating the conditions for a digital NHS' report, which we produced with NHS Confederation, ICS leaders told us that workforce and training were significant barriers to providing and delivering a quality frontline digitalised service. To make this work in the long-term healthcare leaders need: ✅ Fewer core targets, with ICS given the autonomy to choose how to deliver them ✅ Flexibility to meet the demands and needs of their local population ✅ Quality training and support for staff ✅ More capital funding for digital infrastructure ✅ Longer-term, multi-year funding cycles Click the link in comments to read the report in full ⬇️ #DigitalHealthcare #FrontlineDigitisation #NHS

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This resonates with an engagement piece I did with some of the other National Medical Director Clinical Fellows in 22/23. Where we Listened to frontline staff about what good ‘workforce wellbeing’ means to them. The answers nearly all focussed on ‘getting the basics right’. From Practical Basics: having access to functional equipment to do your job, having enough resources including chairs, desks and computers to allow you to perform your tasks (too many people regularly sit on bins in meetings), having space to store belongings, being able to have leave for special occasions such as ‘your own wedding’, getting paid correctly and on time, To cultural basics: feeling listened to, seniors and teams saying ‘thank-you’, teams recognising that colleagues may have priorities that lie outside of work, seeing organisational and team leaders engaged in supporting the wellbeing of the workforce in a meaningful way. These things are not rocket science and do not ‘break the bank’ - in fact they were the sort of thing that I, perhaps naively, expected from any employer when I left university. I certainly did not expect that these would be the issues that would make my life as a doctor hard. These repetitive daily issues are micro aggressions of the work place and are waring and demoralising. Organisations and teams making the effort to listen to their staff and address these fundamental basics would make people feel far more valued than putting on another lunch time yoga class does!

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This guidance supports systems to implement single point of access (SPoA) in their local area, as set out in the Priorities and Operational Planning Guidance 2024/25 and the Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery Plan letter. #nhsengland

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The recent CQC review of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHFT) has uncovered significant failures in patient care and safety, reflecting deep-rooted issues that extend across community mental health services in the UK. With long waiting times, inconsistent care planning, and inadequate risk management, patients remain at risk. While there have been some improvements, particularly at Rampton Hospital, the report highlights the urgent need for standardised care pathways, better staffing, and stronger leadership. These issues are not isolated to NHFT, they mirror wider challenges within our mental health system. It's clear that transformative change is essential. We must prioritise patient safety, strengthen multidisciplinary care, and ensure that mental health services across the country meet the high standards that our communities deserve. Let's use these findings as a catalyst for nationwide reform. 💪 #MentalHealth #Healthcare #Leadership #PatientSafety #CommunityCare #NHS

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First Of Its Kind Practical Resource Is Launched To Support The UK’s Health And Care Sector Health Innovation West Midlands (HIWM) has launched ‘Appreciating Health and Care’, a practical guide for the health and social care sector, enabling professionals from across the UK to adopt an appreciative inquiry approach in the workplace. Working in partnership with fellow organisations, Appreciating People and Aqua, HIWM identified the need for better support for professionals with navigating the pressures and demands facing the sector. In response the world-first resource was created to build on the many great examples where appreciative inquiry is already supporting the industry. ‘Appreciating Health and Care’ provides teams and organisations with practical tools, guidance and case studies and highlights real world examples of appreciative inquiry being used to support overall quality and safety improvement of care. First revealed at a virtual launch on the 30th April, people from all over the country tuned in to learn more about the resource and hear from the team involved in its development. The resource is available to purchase from the Appreciating People's website or as a resource for participants in Health Innovation West Midlands’ and Aqua’s Appreciative Inquiry training programmes and courses. Daniel Hodgkiss, Assistant Programme Manager at HIWM, commented: "It is really exciting to have finally launched the 'Appreciating Health and Care' resource. I believe there is a great opportunity for this information to support individuals, teams and organisations to create positive work cultures which enable practical improvements across health and care settings. “The launch truly highlighted the interest from within the sector and need for a resource such as this with an immediate positive response from the audience attending on the day. Some attendees even stated that they were keen to take some of the learnings straight back to their places of work. “Working in tandem with the other organisations including NHS England, NHS Impact and other international bodies, will enable us to roll out 'Appreciating Health and Care' far and wide, allowing more healthcare staff to support their local improvement projects.” To encourage the uptake of the resource there are plans for the authors to disseminate the document with their colleagues around the world, through a series of presentations and webinars with key organisations such as the Cooperrider Centre at Champlain College and the Q Community at The Health Foundation. To find out more about the resource or get involved with any of the upcoming events, please visit: https://buff.ly/3V7MTPY (https://buff.ly/3V7MTPY) Read More:

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Here’s a snapshot of our mid-year report findings. Our data tables and reports provide an overview of the NMC register and what it tells us about the nursing and midwifery workforce in the UK. We also have reports for the four countries of the UK Welsh versions and an easy read. https://lnkd.in/eDyAHzSS The number of nurses, midwives and nursing associates on the register continues to increase. There are 14,949 (1.8 percent) more professionals than six months ago, and 150,598 (22 percent) more than in March 2017, when the steady growth began. In the last six months, 24,279 nurses, 1,615 midwives and 1,419 nursing associates joined the register. Although the total number on the register has increased, we’ve seen a drop in people joining the register. The total number of new joiners to the register has fallen from 30,103 people during this period last year, to 27,313 in the last six months (9.2 percent decrease). Compared to last year, 1.8 percent fewer UK educated professionals joined the register and 16.6 percent fewer internationally educated professionals joined between April and September. Between April and September 2024, more professionals left the register than in the same period last year – 14,142 against 13,305, which is a 6.3 percent rise for the period. Compared to this period last year, there was a 1.6 percent increase in UK educated leavers, and a 33 percent rise in the number of internationally educated people leaving. However, it is important to consider total leavers as a proportion of the register, and through this lens we see that the proportion of all professionals who left in the six months to September is the same as it was last year: 1.7 percent. We’ve seen a rise in the number of people leaving with a cumulative total of five years or less on the register since first joining: 1,799 in the six months to September, compared to 1,211 in the same period last year. That’s a big increase, but when we look at this as a proportion of a growing register, this group of leavers has remained at 0.2 percent for the last six months, and last year. We know that when somebody leaves the register, it’s not necessarily forever and there are thousands of ‘returners’ each year, but we’ll monitor to see whether it is the start of a gradual trend towards less time on the register on average. Read the report in detail: https://lnkd.in/ebXM5FuK #Nursing #Midwifery #Healthcare #NMCReport

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Our 2024 Impact Report is available to read! The report aligns with the priorities of the health system and cover how our work is: 🔶 Improving Health Outcomes 🔶 Addressing Health Inequalities 🔶Driving System Transformation 🔶Stimulating Inclusive Economic Growth As well as helping the NHS to find, adopt and spread innovations that benefit patients and save the health system money, our work also supports our regional and national economies by attracting inward investment and creating or safeguarding jobs. Visit our interactive report to read about the work we have done with our partners, stakeholders and ICSs to improve the lives of those in our region through innovation. https://ow.ly/p9T550Tcg3C West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, an integrated care system, NHS South Yorkshire ICB, NHS Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB), NHS England, Health Innovation Network #Partners #Healthcare #HealthcarePriorities #Innovation

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Occupational Health colleagues - I am very interested to know your views on the the NHS App. Do you believe that if a client was willing to show you their GP health records, including referrals and test results, it could significantly assist your OH assessment? I am wondering how much this could possibly negate the need for FME, how OH would adequately record having seen the medical evidence via the app and for it to stand up as evidence in an ET or for it to provide sufficient evidence to put forward complex workplace adjustments/recommendations? How would OH record how client consent was given for you to look at their health record in this way? For instance, is it sufficient to state, “Client A willingly showed me their GP summary via their NHS app. I saw that X medication is prescribed which evidences treatment for x conditions which is the cause of sickness absence/inability to conduct x tasks at work. I also see that a referral was made to X specialist on X date”. There will inevitably be many many more questions emanating from this digital health record development. I personally have this NHS app, and from a patient perspective I think it’s fantastic, especially for being informed, speed and convenience. If I was referred to OH myself, would I show my OH assessor my health record in this way?? I’m really not sure yet…However as an OH professional, I’m quite excited at the prospect of some research being done on the NHS app and its role in OH consultations some time in the future! https://lnkd.in/e7B5szTY

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This is a great piece of analysis to show the relative ROI of different types of preventative interventions, with opportunities to better evidence and target such activity. We need more reports like this. This does of course bring to mind the challenges involved in ensuring those returns could then be realised and redistributed in a way that enables a systemic shift in investment upstream. As the report concludes, there may be hope with a #mission-led approach; maybe it's time to dust off the learning from whole place community budgets?

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Interesting opinion piece from the BMJ discussing the aftermath of the closure of Public Health England, highlighting the need for robust public health structures to enhance health outcomes. The article critiques the fragmentation and lack of leadership in the current system, emphasising the importance of establishing a cohesive and independent public health framework to address health inequalities and improve overall public health resilience. https://bit.ly/4f6a8kM #Healthcare #PI #PersonalInjury #ClinicalNegligence #MedNeg Fiona Morrison

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