National Health Service

Healthcare Freakonomics

For some strange reason the healthcare sector manages to escape the sort of forensic analysis others are subjected to. There’s this strange coalition of patient confidentiality, ethics, professional integrity and public policy. These combine to create this “opaque soup” of information which nobody understands and even fewer believe. In the UK we get bombarded by [...]

Intel Health Guide Comes to NHS

CHALFONT ST GILES, England & SANTA CLARA, Calif.–GE Healthcare, a unit of GE (NYSE:GE), and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) announced today that they have expanded their sales and marketing agreement for the Intel Health Guide to include the United Kingdom. GE Healthcare already markets the Intel Health Guide in the United States. “Both the Department of [...]

E-health to boost patient safety in Australia

The federal government says its proposed e-health system will improve patient safety and free up GPs. The system, currently under design, will see patient records stored in one national database that can be accessed by different health professionals. The government hopes to see the opt-out system up and running in ten years, and says more [...]

The public sector starts at No 1 Easy Street

For years Karen Moffat toiled away in the canteen of her local supermarket, before realising she could earn more, work fewer hours and be less stressed by taking a job in the public sector. The mother of two is one of more than 900,000 workers to have signed up for a life working for the [...]

Remote Patient Monitoring Could Save £ billions

The scope of a new global healthcare market worth billions of pounds is being tested by Philips, the electronics group, in the UK with the world’s biggest trial of distance monitoring of chronically ill patients in their homes. The Dutch company is hoping to prove to the NHS that it can stem the mounting financial [...]

NICE Programme for Medical Devices

This sounds great news for us. The type of research we’re doing is beyond the state of the science and post research adoption is bound to be an issue. But with a NICE programme to talk to we can expect a fast track – we hope. Reprint of a NICE Press Release The National Institute [...]

UK’s New Era In Health Care

Here’s some excerpts from the Gov Monitor describing the new strategy for health which will put patients first. It’s hard to imagine anything sounding more trite than that – after all what’s healthcare about if not patients? That’s a rhetorical question of course. For clinicians and nurses healthcare has always been about patients. If only [...]

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Action call over diagnosis errors

Hundreds of thousands of people could be misdiagnosed by doctors in Scotland every year, a BBC Scotland investigation has revealed. Medics could be getting it wrong in as many as 15% of patient consultations in hospital and primary care. But cases of misdiagnosis, which do not all result in harm to the patient, are not [...]

Scottish Patient Safety Programme

The Scottish Patient Safety Programme will be implemented in every acute hospital in the country. The initial goals are to drive improvements in:

NHS may need to lose 137,000 staff

The NHS may need to cut its workforce by about 10 per cent — the equivalent of 137,000 staff — to help to meet planned savings of £20 billion, according to a leaked Department of Health report. A study commissioned from the consultancy firm McKinsey and Company recommends cutting clinical staff posts as well as [...]

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