RECENT NEWS

Doctors discussed the barriers that exist to delivering quality care, at the What’s A Doctor Worth? BMA event which was undertaken to inform contract negotiations.

The implementation of the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) in the NHS has had an adverse impact on training in certain medical specialties, including surgeons and doctors working in acute medicine, says an independent taskforce, commissioned by the Government.

The Public Accounts Committee has published its 46th Report on emergency admissions to hospital and chronic shortage of specialist A&E consultants. The results show that there is no clear strategy in place for tackling a lack of A&E specialists.

Surgeons and healthcare professionals in Wales are concerned over a lack of funding for bariatric surgery and obesity treatments across the country, despite the launch of an all-Wales strategy more than three years ago.

Technology that gives instant alerts about patients to healthcare staff, and allows them to communicate over a secure social network, has transformed how teams work and has significantly improved patient care, according to Dr Michael Bedford, a renal research registrar at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Trust (EKHUFT).

Bowel Cancer UK has highlighted a lack of surveillance screening and is calling for this to be addressed to ensure early detection of the disease, particularly for younger people who are at higher risk of bowel cancer.

An independent review has concluded that healthcare organisations, including hospitals and GP practices, need to embrace a new culture of candour so that patients and their families are told honestly about any harm that has been caused and what will be done to put it right,.

New research quantifying the risk of admission to hospital for self-harm has identified a raised risk of self-harm among groups of patients with certain physical illnesses.

A patient safety alert has been issued to NHS services that use ECG machines to diagnose cardiac problems, highlighting the risk associated with printing the wrong patient’s ECG records, which could lead to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has published the first Medtech Innovation Briefings on a range of novel technologies.

A new curriculum, designed to encourage junior doctors to study in Wales, will see medical students spending more time training in clinical settings. BMA Cymru Wales has welcomed the modification at Cardiff University’s medical school called C21 (21st century).

Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is likely to become a primary screening method for chromosomal abnormalities in pregnancy in the future, reducing invasive testing and the associated risks, according to a scientific impact paper published by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG).

With almost one-in-five children with diabetes developing a dangerous complication known as Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKA) – a lack of insulin in the body – before they are officially diagnosed with the condition, doctors are calling for greater diabetes awareness.

Patients in Scotland will have secure online access to their own health information by 2020 according to Alex Neil, the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing.

NHS England has committed to invest £90 m to diagnose two-thirds of people with dementia by March 2015. Jeremy Hunt, The Health Secretary, has also challenged the NHS to bring down the average wait for an assessment for dementia to six weeks from GP referral in each area of England.

Scientists at Imperial College London have discovered that iron deficiency may increase stroke risk by making the blood more sticky. The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.

According to the Journal of Endovascular Therapy, despite good immediate results, in up to 40% of patients with diabetes, obstructed arteries in the leg treated with a stent will again become blocked.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is recommending that doctors consider many more people to be at risk of heart disease, stroke or peripheral arterial disease.

A set of 10 molecules in blood could be used to predict with 90% accuracy whether people are at greater risk of developing dementia within the next few years, according to researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, USA.

A new report from the Surgical Never Events Taskforce makes a series of recommendations for new standards and systems to further improve the safety of surgery in English hospitals.