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#GPnews: Trusts failing to see one in seven A&E patients within four hours

16:15 Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire – which was the first NHS hospital to be run privately – has been rated ‘good’ by the CQC, after spending nearly two years in ‘special measures’. 

The CQC said it still needs to improve its emergency care, the BBC reports, but it generally found ‘significant improvements.’ 

The hospital was placed in special measures in September 2015 when it was run by Circle Health, and it was later returned to NHS control in April 2015. 

14:45 NHS trusts are failing to see one in seven A&E patients within four hours, latest figures reveal. 

In response, Dr Mark Porter, BMA council chair, said: ’These figures are the latest in a spate of reports that show our health service is reaching a crisis point from a combination of increasing demand and inadequate resources. Huge efforts locally by doctors and other team members are important but are hampered because the Government does not match the rising demand with sufficient investment.

’We can only get to grips with pressure on A&Es if every part of the system – from our GP surgeries, to hospitals, to community care – is fully supported and working well, and this includes addressing the shortage of A&E staff. We urgently need a long term strategy for the NHS that will help ease the fundamental workload and funding challenges that are overwhelming our health service.’

11:50 More from our story yesterday that LMCs are being excluded from talks over the secret STP plans, with this tweet from Avon LMC:

11:20 The number of cot deaths in England and Wales has almost halved in ten years, and fallen to the lowest number since records began, figures show.

There were 207 sudden infant deaths in 2004, compared with 128 in 2014, according to provisional data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The Telegraph reports that the decline is thought to be the result of warmer winters and a drop in smoking rates among pregnant women.

Rosie Amery, from the ONS’s health analysis and life Eevents team, said: ’Unexplained infant deaths in 2014 were the lowest on record, driven by a decrease in sudden infant deaths.

’A number of factors may have contributed to the fall, including warmer-than-average temperatures throughout the year, fewer women smoking at the time of delivery, and greater awareness of safer sleeping practices.’

9:25 A quarter of CCGs are ignoring a target for urgent cases of mental illness to be treated within two weeks, an FOI by the Liberal Democrats has revealed.

The BBC report that the waiting-time target introduced by NHS England in April 2016 requires that any patient aged 14 to 65 experiencing their first episode of psychosis receives treatment within two weeks of referral.

Out of the 170 CCGs who responded to the FOI, 23% said they had applied the target to for 14- to 35-year-olds only, while more than three-quarters of those had no firm plans to extend it to 35- to 65-year-olds this year.