NHS complaints soar- backlog hits 4,000

NHS complaints backlog hits 4,000 and the health watchdog has hired a consultancy firm to help ease a backlog of nearly 4,000 patient complaints.
The Healthcare Commission has been forced into the move - just six months into the job - as there had been a huge surge in grievances.
Only 525 of 4,500 complaints have been solved but the commission said it was confident the backlog would be tackled.
A third of the protests received deal with hospital care, with 22% relating to primary care practitioners such as dentists and GPs.
How NHS complaints work:
Complaints at the first stage are made to the local NHS trust
If the dispute cannot be resolved, it is then passed on to the Healthcare Commission
The commission then either makes a decision or in the most serious cases it is passed on to the ombudsman or General Medical Council
Marcia Fry, the commission's head of operational development, said: "We recognise that because of the unexpectedly high numbers there have been some delays.
"However, we are committed to ensuring that by the end of the February all complainants will have received an update on the status of their complaint."
If the complaints continue to be received at the current rate, 9,000 will be logged by the end of the commission's first year in charge - three times as many as were submitted the previous year.
The commission said the rise was partly due to increased confidence in the new regime - the NHS used to handled complaints itself.
Officials also said a number of NHS trusts, which pass complaints on to the commission if they cannot be resolved at a local level, had been holding on to them until the commission took on the responsibility in August.
Michael Summers, chairman of the Patients Association, said he had a degree of sympathy for the commission.
"We like the commission, it has been doing a good job. I think part of the problem is that this is a legacy left over from the previous regime.
If you are concerned that your loved one actually did not receive the quality of care they should have and died needlessly, you are going to want that looked at pretty quickly
Ann Abraham, the parliamentary and health service ombudsman
"The commission has been given the job of clearing up a bit of a mess.
"But the important thing for patients is that the commission gets to grips with this as quickly as possible.
"Complaints need to be handled in a thorough way."
Ann Abraham, the parliamentary and health service ombudsman, said she was growing extremely concerned about the situation.
"People aren't getting their complaints looked at in a timely manner.
"If you are concerned that your loved one actually did not receive the quality of care they should have and died needlessly, you are going to want that looked at pretty quickly."

Published by the bbc on 4th February 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4230399.stm

Hospitals will close in the name of choice says Reid

Hospitals will be allowedto close if patients choose to go elsewhere for non-emergency surgery, John Reid, the health secretary, said yesterday.
If the creation of extra capacity left the National Health Service with underused wards and theatres, or if it paid privately run centres for operations that patients did not take up, that was a "price worth paying" for the benefits of choice, said Mr Reid.
"For 60 years [since the NHS was founded] the power in health in this country has lain with the providers," he said. "I am going to transfer power to the patients."
Everyone, he said, wanted the "best hospital in the world at the end of their street". But the way to get that was to allow patients the choice to go elsewhere, with competition producing better local services.
Asked if that might not lead hospitals to close, he said: "The patients will decide that. I am not going to force people to take a third rate service. Patients will get the choice because for 60 years they have had to take it or leave it."
Mr Reid said there would be a series of steps before a hospital closed, ranging from assistance to replacement of the chief executive and management team. "If all that fails and local people still say the quality of the hospital is so bad . . . amI going to say 'no, you are forced to go to that hospital?'"
Asked if politicians were prepared to face up to that and let a hospital close, he said: "This politician is."
Challenged by reports that some NHS-run treatment centres were already running half-empty as capacity expanded, with hospitals facing deficits as a result, he said: "Even if they are haemorrhaging £5m, that is out of £50bn [the NHS budget] and it is worth it to give patients this degree of choice."
He was equally prepared to see operating slots go unused in the independently run treatment centres, for which the NHS is committed to pay under the current contracts. Patients would not be forced to use the independent centres, he said, but providing them with choice would drive improvements.
His comments came as he released figures showing the use of extra NHS facilities and independently run mobile operating centres had cut the wait for cataracts so that no one was waiting more than three months for an operation, with most patients treated within six weeks.
In Oxford and Bristol, he claimed, independent treatment centres had cut waits for more serious operations as the easier cases were transferred to them.
His stance, however, brought warnings from the NHS Confederation that hospital services were inter-related. Patients would only have a choice over non-emergency surgery. "But if patient choice closes the orthopaedic department, that would have a knock-on effect on its ability to do trauma surgery which means the accident and emergency department could go as a result," said Nigel Edwards, the confederation's policy director.
"That may not be what patients want," he said. "The secretary of state's bullish approach to closure may be entirely appropriate for a day surgery unit or free-standing centre. It might not be so appropriate if it means closing the accident and emergency department in a large town."
James Johnson, chairman of council of the British Medical Association, said: "There is much more at stake here than the secretary of state seems to acknowledge." If hospitals closed, NHS capacity would decrease, he said, and patients would lose more than surgical beds. "Where will they get the round-the-clock care, the intensive care beds, and where will doctors and nurses be trained?"

Published by the Financial Times on 3rd February 2005
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/35fe7f44-758a-11d9-9608-00000e2511c8.html

Government pledge on IVF in tatters as units fail to cope with demand

30 January 2005

Thousands of couples desperate to become parents will not receive free fertility treatment, despite a government pledge to offer at minimum of one cycle on the National Health Service.
An investigation by The Independent on Sunday can reveal that fertility services in England and Wales are in crisis, with some NHS trusts refusing to supply any treatment for certain couples.
In what has been described as a "shambles" by critics of the Government, some cash-strapped trusts will be unable to provide any treatment by the April deadline set a year ago by John Reid, the Secretary of State for Health, while others will be forced to reduce the level of treatment which they already offer.
Fifteen out of the 38 trusts surveyed said they did not have treatment in place two months before the deadline.
Selby and York trust said that after April, couples with adopted children would not qualify for treatment and Suffolk said that in future they would offer two cycles of treatment only to couples who could afford to contribute £700 towards treatment, nearly three-quarters of the total cost.
Birmingham will disqualify people who have children from a previous relationship.
Manchester PCT and Avon both already offer at least two cycles. However, they said they would have to cut back these services to only one cycle because of the expected increase in demand for IVF after April.
Both North Wales and Mid Wales said they could not afford to offer treatment and that couples would instead be referred to Liverpool.
A spokesman for the NorthWest Wales NHS trust said: "This costs money and I'm afraid that we cannot afford this service for outpatients."
Many experts believe that even one cycle of fertility treatment is inadequate. This provision falls short of the three free cycles recommended last year by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) for couples who have a 10 per cent chance of pregnancy.
The disclosures come as increasing numbers of couples are being diagnosed with fertility problems. Almost 5,000 patients receive IVF treatment on the NHS each year, and one in seven couples face fertility problems.
Caron and Damian Barnes, who are both in their early forties and from Bangor in North Wales, decided to try for a family in 1999, but remain childless. They say their attempts to conceive have been frustrated by a lack of NHS provision for fertility treatment.
"We have spent thousands and are trying one more time. Then we will give up," said Mrs Barnes, who knows couples who have gone abroad to Spain in search of egg and sperm donors rather than join the waiting list in the UK.
"It is not fair that everywhere else you get treatment and yet in North Wales you don't and we all pay the same taxes. Even if you decide to pay yourself there are no facilities here, so you have to travel to another part of the country which makes it even more expensive."
Dr Simon Fishl, director of Nottingham-based CareFertility, said the fertility treatment crisis had worsened in some areas since last year.
He said: "It's a mixed-up, crazy and in some ways worsened situation since John Reid declared his support of the Nice guidelines."
The National Infertility Awareness Campaign (NIAC) is carrying out its own survey of trusts in an attempt to establish where treatment will be available, and the results will be published later this year.
Professor Robert Winston, the leading fertility expert, denounced the Government's one-cycle pledge as "complete nonsense" and urged ministers to spend money on researching ways of offering cheaper and more extensive treatment for couples with fertility problems.
"That is one of the reasons I'm so angry about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Institute (HFEA), which seems to want to expand its practice when IVF is being priced out of the market," said Lord Winston, professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London.
"It's all very unsatisfactory. There is an issue as to whether we want this type of medicine and whether we want to pay for it. In some countries, like Israel, it's not unusual to offer 15 cycles of treatment," he said.
Andrew Lansley MP, the vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Infertility, said: "I think inevitably there will still be a postcode lottery and this will be the case until the NHS routinely provides the service that Nice has recommended."
The Department of Health responded that the Nice guidance on infertility could not be implemented "over-night" and it was reviewing the role of the HFEA.

first published by the Independent On Sunday 30th January 2005 at:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=606017