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NHS chief hints at imminent major reorganisation to GP-led commissioning
GP training set for swingeing cuts as education bosses told to find 30% saving
15:05 The RCGP has hailed GPs for their work in accommodating older patients.
This comes as the Welsh older people’s commissioner warned of a number of obstacles facing elderly in receiving good care.
They said that a whilst a majority of elderly rated their GP highly, the BBC News website lists issues including difficulties with making appointments, concerns with access to buildings and difficult to give feedback or raise a concern or complaint.
An RCGP spokesperson said it was ‘testament to the hard work of GPs and our teams at a time of such intense resource and workforce pressures, that the majority of our older patients are reporting good care from their family doctor’.
13:25 Regular blood tests every four months could spot ovarian cancer at an early stage in women with a high risk of developing the disease, a UK study has found.
The trial on 4,348 women, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, focused on women with a greater than one-in-10 chance of developing ovarian cancer due to a gene mutation.
It saw doctors monitoring levels of the chemical CA125 in the participants’ blood, tracking levels three times a year, as well as carryiung out annual scans, for a three-year period.
Four years after the trial started, 19 cases of cancer were detected, 10 of which were at an early stage, reports the BBC.
09:30 Following on from yesterday’s report that last year’s NHS data loss scandal saw 500,000 pieces of patient information go missing, the Guardian reveals which areas were most affected by the problems.
It says internal NHS documents show that 250,530 (49%) of the 515,437 pieces of patient information went missing in the east Midlands.
Meanwhile, another 129,992 (25%) related to patients in the south of England, especially the south-west, and 80,472 (15.6%) related to people in London. And some 51,563 (10%) of data related to patients the north of England.
Proportionally, the largest number of documents (more than 25,000) were mislaid for patients in the NHS Nottingham CCG area by NHS Business Services Authority, which was responsible for moving test result correspondence between hospitals and GPs at the time.
It adds that 573 ‘live cases’ are still being investigated by NHS England to see if patients were harmed by the incident which meant test results including bloods and biopsies were not communicated to patients’ GPs.
