HSJ Health Check

Harnessing an opportunity to use the ‘full power of data’ to improve patient care, or a worrying ‘data grab’? The government has published its draft data strategy and we discuss what this could mean for transparency, care quality and how it links to the ongoing GP record-sharing debacle. Also, the latest and most significant integrated care system legislation updates, including more on the ICS design framework and how ongoing boundary disputes are limiting some systems’ progress. Featuring Nick Carding, Annabelle Collins and Dave West.

Monday marked the deadline for applicants wanting to be the next NHS England CEO to throw their hat in the ring. In this podcast HSJ editor Alastair McLellan talks to the former health secretary and current chair of Commons Health and Social Care committee about how the most powerful person in the NHS will be chosen.

Dr Waheed Arian escaped from Afghanistan and came to the UK as a child refugee in 1999. Since then, he has become an A&E doctor and founded global telemedicine charity ‘Arian Teleheal’. In this episode Annabelle Collins is joined by Dr Arian, who discusses why simplicity was key when it came to launching a successful telemedicine charity, how his formative experiences in Afghanistan inspired its creation and why the NHS must do more to improve global health inequalities. We also discuss the impact of the pandemic on the NHS workforce and why it is ill-equipped to deal with staff suffering from PTSD – a condition Dr Arian has personal experiences recovering from. Dr Arian’s memoir ‘In the wars’ is published on June 17th.

Under the cover of Cummings’ headline-grabbing testimony last week, NHS England gave plans to scrap the landmark 4-hour A&E target the greenlight. We discuss how the ‘ten metrics’ intended to replace it could work in practice. Will they result in safer patient care or be too unwieldy to work in reality? Also this week – NHS chief executive Yvonne Ormston has written powerfully about her experience both as an NHS leader and a cancer patient during the pandemic; we compare her frontline view to that of a government insider, as set out by Dominic Cummings last week.

With Cumming’s setting the health select committee on fire, serious allegations were raised about Matt Hancock’s handling of the pandemic. In this week’s podcast we investigate what the biggest allegations were, what new information was revealed and what it really means for the health secretary’s career. Featuring Sharon Brennan, Lawrence Dunhill and Nick Carding.

HSJ revealed in an investigation this week that serious concerns were raised by patients at a mental health hospital for children in the years before it was rated ‘inadequate’ by the national regulator in March 2021. We ask why it took so long for action to be taken and whether there is an enduring problem with care quality at private mental health hospitals? We also shine the spotlight on autism care in South West, where spiralling waiting lists hint at the scale of a national crisis which needs fixing. Featuring Nick Carding, Rebecca Thomas and Annabelle Collins.

In this week’s podcast we discuss how the government’s health and social care legislation plans are changing — both in substance and in context. That includes government concessions on some crucial legal details, ministers’ new priorities for the service, getting to grips with implementation, and what the change in NHS England’s chief executive might mean. Featuring Sharon Brennan, Dave West and Annabelle Collins.

Sir Simon Stevens will step down from running the NHS at the end of July, and so the countdown begins; 12 weeks to find a successor. This week Alastair, Dave and Annabelle discuss the recruitment process, who’s involved and why we could end up with an interim instead. We discuss the front-runners in more detail and whether someone with a narrower, more operational focus than Sir Simon might be the preference of government.

The NHS – and in indeed the World – has been watching the catastrophic covid surge in India, with almost 400,000 cases recorded in a single day. This week we are joined by a member of our India office who describes the impact this has had on her family and how “disease and death has become so much a part of the everyday conversation”. We hear how social media has become an important tool for families desperately searching for a hospital bed. We also take the discussion closer to home and cover the creeping pressure on primary and secondary care, with some GPs shutting down patient self-referral systems for fear of becoming swamped over the weekend.

At the start of the pandemic, financial services company Greensill launched ‘Earnd’, an advanced payment system, for NHS staff. Some trusts signed up for it and it was given backing from senior figures in the health service. A year later, both have gone bust, former PM David Cameron is implicated in a lobbying scandal involving Greensill and serious questions are being asked about what exactly happened to the payroll data of the staff who used the app. We dig into this along with recent revelations that the health secretary omitted to declare his connection to Topwood, a company owned by his close family. We ask how these governance shortcomings managed to slip through the net and whether public trust has been sorely damaged – or if the successful vaccination scheme is too good a shield for this government? Featuring Ben Clover, Annabelle Collins and Alison Moore.