Accenture quits £1.9bn NHS deal!

Accenture has quit the £1.9bn NHS deal. Full story here. What does this mean now? CSC are taking over, but does that mean that too many 'eggs' will be in too few baskets?

What is happening to the NHS Connecting for Health programme? More to follow I am sure.

Tags: Accenture, CSC, NHS

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Keep Hospitals Open - New web site opens

Further to our previous post about Maternity Hospitals closing and the sad story of Andrew and Rachel Canter. We are please to see that they now have their own web site Keep Hospitals Open up and running.

We wish them well with their campaign as they join a number of other web sites focused on exposing what is currently happening across the UK's NHS.

Tags: Keep Hospitals Open, Maternity Hospitals. NHS

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I could be happening near you!

There has been various items in the mainstream media about then plan to carry out another re-configuration of the NHS. Is this parlance for yet more cuts and closures, from the ballyhoo, created it would seem that this may be the case.

The current government know that the cuts made to the NHS staffing levels in 2006 have not settled well with the public and as Labour move towards a new leader and the prospect of the next election, it's time to think about the marginal's and how high-risk Labour seats could be jeopardised by further NHS cuts/closures being made in the wrong place!

An investigation by the Guardian Newspaper shows that high-level meeting are taking place to sort-out where the axe should next fall, probably not of course, in the areas of those high-risk marginal seats! Or, am I being just a bit to cynical?

Tags: NHS, Guardian Newspaper

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Maternity Ward Crisis deepens!

As the health secretary Hewitt vows that NHS reforms to set to continue, yet another NHS cuts related story has emerged today about the tragic still born birth of Andrew and Rachel Canters son.

Rachel Canter could have received help for her birth complications at Barnet maternity unit, had it not been not closed (due to staff shortages!) to new admissions on the day she gave birth. Andrew and Rachel were therefore forced to drive to an alternate hospital seeking assistance by which time it was tragically too late and their son, Jake was still born.

These types of incidents (over an year ago) seem to be happening more often as NHS job cuts take effect.

Evidence compiled by The Sunday Times shows that:

• In one year, maternity hospitals in Greater Manchester had to close on 90 occasions, some for up to a day. One had to close 29 times. A shortage of staff has forced Greater Manchester and East Cheshire hospitals to plan cuts in the number of maternity units from 13 to 8.

• Women are frequently turned away from London’s major hospitals. St Thomas’s hospital is understood to have closed to new admissions three times in a fortnight but has refused to disclose details. Chelsea and Westminster hospital has closed its maternity unit four times in the past year for up to 11 hours.

• Last month a woman in labour was turned away from maternity hospitals in Hastings and Eastbourne before setting off on a 30-mile journey to Pembury, Kent.

• The Barratt maternity unit at Northampton general hospital had to close during two weekends in March, once for up to 30 hours, forcing 10 women to be redirected.

The NHS Watch Blog also found a further incident, where Miriam Grice was left sitting in a pool of blood for more than three hours after giving birth, she was eventually forced to phone her mother for help because staff at St James's Hospital, in Leeds were so over stretched!

Miriam Grice has criticised staffing levels at the Hospital, in Leeds, where she says that two midwives were left to look after 26 mothers. This full story here.

Perhaps this is another table that we should add to the NHS Watch web site showing comparison maternity staffing/patient levels so that there is an indication of potential issue.

Do you have any feedback you would like to leave as a comment?

As as P.S. to this post...

We saw Andrew and Rachel Canter give one of their interviews on the TV today and heard about their campaign to help others, I was a bit surprised not to hear the TV company give out any further information about their campaign, telephone number, web site address etc.

As I say, I was a bit surprised, but on the other hand I think that I am beginning to see the emergence of a reticence by some mainstream media companies not to list links to third party campaigners, unless of course there is an angle in it for them. Andrew and Rachel Canters campaign is a good example. Save the Alexandra Hospital, Redditch in its early days was another good example, now of course it is fully covered.

 Surely it does not cost any of the TV companies anything at all to give out a link to help people like Andrew and Rachel Canter and others, or perhaps the TV companies have an hidden agenda!

We've written to Andrew and Rachel Canter to see if we can link from here and the NHS Watch Web site. Watch for another post.

Tags: NHS, Maternity Staffing

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Health Emergency

We came across this newspaper a while ago and thought that we had posted about it, but an emalier to the NHS Watch web site reminded us.

Health Emergency has been running various campaigns around various aspects of the NHS for a number of years - in fact it was formed back in 1984. Although originally focuses on London based Health issues, some of the current campaigns it brings publicity to include NHS related issues at Bart's, Guy's, Edgware General, Oldchurch, Charing Cross, Kidderminster, and Queen Mary's Roehampton.

The site is well worth a visit to view the latest campaigns as is a read of the latest issue of their newspaper.

This can be downloaded from their web site here.

You'll need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view this paper which you can get for free from here.

Tags: NHS

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A U-Turn! Perhaps!

We've been away from posting on this Blog for sometime, but now were back and have some subjects to catch up on.

It seem that Patricia Hewitt is having a rethink, or maybe just admitting to what we have all known for sometime. It's Jobs that are disappearing not Posts! Hewitt admitting this at a recent Institute for Public Policy Research speech. - See link for background [1]

More concerning, is her admission that she has no idea in which direction the NHS is headed. “Where will we be in five years, ten years, fifteen years’ time?” she asked at the same conference!

Now, I may be a bit on the thick side here, so I regret asking the question. But after all the recent (some 11 years) hands-on management of the NHS on every aspect of its operation, she as the Government spokesperson has no idea as to where it's going?

I think I must be dreaming... Because I find it unbelievable that anyone would openly admit, that after Eleven years of spending huge amounts of money on various projects within one of the biggest organisations in the world, she has "no idea where the organisation is going'!

I think its time for Ms. Hewitt to pack her bags and move onto bigger and better things - isn't that what successful people do when they seem to have made such a good job of their current position!

What do you think?

Tags: NHS

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