Health Management and Policy Alert

Communications toolkit for local maternity teams to improve communications with Black, Asian and minority ethnic women

NHS England -
This toolkit aims to provide helpful suggestions about how to communicate with women of different backgrounds, about the extra support that is available to them, as well as signposting to currently available publications, messaging, insights and templates.

• Toolkit
• NHS England - publications

What people are telling us: a summary, July - September 2020

Healthwatch - 
Between July and September 2020, over 38,082 people shared their experiences of using health and social care with Healthwatch. The briefing is a summary of the key issues that the public are telling us about, including access to NHS dental care; the support provided in care homes; and accessing COVID-19 tests.

• Briefing
• Press release

Better Care Fund: policy statement 2020 to 2021

Department of Health and Social Care -
This document confirms how local authorities and CCGs should proceed with finalising plans and pooling agreements for funding under the Better Care Fund in 2020 to 2021, and sets out the national conditions for the Fund.

• Policy statement
• Department of Health and Social Care - publications

Improving flow along care pathways: learning from the Flow Coaching Academy programme

The Health Foundation -
The Flow Coaching Academy (FCA) programme is based on a co-coaching model combined with elements of improvement science. It aims to support establishing multiple FCAs across the UK, to scale up the approach and to build a community of practice to share learning. The training focuses on both the technical and relationship skills required to deliver continuous and sustainable improvement. This learning report is based on the formative FCA evaluation completed in 2019 by RAND Europe and interviews with FCA programme leads during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• Report
• The Health Foundation - publications

Elective care in England: assessing the impact of Covid-19 and where next

The Health Foundation -
This analysis shows there were 4.7 million fewer people referred for routine hospital care – such as hip, knee and cataract surgery – between January and August 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, representing a potential hidden backlog of unmet care needs.

• Briefing
• The Health Foundation - news

NHS hospital food survey

Patients Association - 

Being offered a choice of meals is very important to inpatients, this survey of patients' experience of hospital catering has found. This survey, commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care, was designed to complement, and feed into, the work of the NHS Hospital Food Review Panel. Patients who had spent one or more nights in hospital in the past six months were asked about their experiences of hospital catering.

• Report
• More detail
• Food review

590 people’s stories of hospital during Covid-19

Healthwatch - 

In partnership with British Red Cross, this report reviews the experiences of 590 people after being discharged from hospital. The research shows significant numbers of people are not receiving follow-up support under new policy to switch to a ‘discharge to assess’ model in March 2020 (introduced to cope with demand at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic), leading to unmet needs. It calls on the NHS to address these issues coming into the busy winter period amidst growing pressures of a second Covid-19 wave.

• Report
• Press release

Endometriosis in the UK: time for change

All-Party Parliamentary Group on Endometriosis -
This report highlights the impact endometriosis can have on all aspects of a person’s life, and urges Ministers to take bold action to ensure those with endometriosis have access to the right care at the right time. It finds that average diagnosis times for endometriosis have not improved in over a decade.

• Report
• All-Party Parliamentary Group on Endometriosis - publications

Health service use in the last two years of life

The Strategy Unit -
This series of reports describe the health services that patients use in the last two years of their lives. Reports are available for the Midlands region as a whole and for each of the 11 Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships or Integrated Care Systems in the region. The reports contain important insights into: how the patterns of service use change as patients approach death; differences in experience by ethnicity, deprivation and cause of death; the costs of hospital treatment at the end of life and how this varies by STP; levels of non-beneficial treatments; and the additional hospital capacity that may be required to accommodate the projected increase in deaths over the next decade.

• Reports

Out of sight – who cares?: a review of restraint, seclusion and segregation for autistic people, and people with a learning disability and/or mental health condition

Care Quality Commission -
This report tells the story of restrictive practices from the perspective of people who have experienced it first-hand and looks at how long-term segregation was used. The review finds that the environment of mental health hospitals was often not therapeutic. It also finds that some people were admitted without proper assessment and did not have an assessment of their needs while in hospital, resulting in the lack of a clear care and treatment plan.

• Report
• Care Quality Commission - publications