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#GPnews: ‘Reply all’ brings NHS email to its knees

15:45 GPs and other NHS workers were having some fun on Twitter today as they learned a colleague (who reportedly works in IT) had emailed every single user of NHS Mail.

The problems were made worse when lots of people thought it was a good idea to ‘reply all’, said NHS Digital.

Read the story here


15:00 Prime Minister Theresa May has said there is still a ‘huge amount’ to be done to raise awareness of diabetes, reports the Daily Mail.

Mrs May, who herself has type-1 diabetes, was highlighting the condition on World Diabetes Day.

‘There is a huge amount to be done in terms of awareness, a huge amount to be done in terms of helping people who are at risk of becoming diabetic to know what they can do so that they don’t – they can change their lifestyle and change their futures,’ she said whilst visiting the opening of a new Diabetes UK headquarters.

12:35 Dementia has now overtaken heart disease as the leading cause of death in England and Wales according to new figures from the Office of National Statistics.

According to the BBC, last year dementia was responsible for 11.6% of all recorded deaths, with 61,000 people dying of the disease.

Reasons given for the change included an ageing population, reduced mortality from other diseases, and that doctors are getting better at diagnosing dementia and giving it weight on death certificates.

However, this is mostly for women, as breaking down the causes of death by gender, heart disease was still the leading cause of death for men.

And if all types of cancer are grouped together, this is the most common cause of death, accounting for 27.9% of deaths overall.

11:55 Welsh GP practices will be paid £9.80 for vaccinations and immunisations, bringing the fee level in line with England.

The latest GPC Wales newsletter said this will be backdated to 1 April 2016 and was achieved ‘after much work by the negotiating team’.

09:30 The reason why most of the 44 blueprints for NHS change, drawn up across England, remain unknown is because NHS England told local managers to keep them ‘out of the public domain’, the BBC reports.

In some cases, managers were even instructed how to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests for the sustainability and transformation plans (STPs).

According to the report, this was because senior NHS managers wanted to ‘manage’ the narrative on STPs because of the sensitive nature of the changes.

As reported by Pulse, plans include closing community hospitals and reducing the number of GP practices.

But it’s not only patients who are in the dark about plans, with the report from the King’s Fund highlighting GPs as one of the NHS provider groups that was ‘least involved’ in drawing them up.

Read our story about the report here