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2nd October 2015

Political Update Banner

RCS attends Jeremy Corbyn’s first Labour Party Conference as leader

The first Labour Party Conference under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn MP took place in Brighton between 27th and 30th September.

All eyes were on the new leader’s speech on Tuesday. Mr Corbyn covered issues including human rights and foreign affairs, economic security and equality, support for public services, and increasing democracy within the Labour Party. On health, he repeated earlier pledges to prioritise funding for the NHS and resist the involvement of independent providers, and criticised the Government’s handling of the proposed new junior doctors’ contracts. Mr Corbyn has made mental health a priority in his approach to health policy, firstly by creating a new Shadow Cabinet post of Shadow Mental Health Minister, filled by Luciana Berger MP. In his conference speech, the leader pledged an increase in funding for mental health services, with a particular focus on services for children and young people. 

The new Shadow Health Secretary, Heidi Alexander MP, focused her conference speech on NHS funding and staffing concerns. Ms Alexander raised questions around the Government’s plans to introduce extra funding of £8 billion per year for the NHS, as pledged in the Conservative election manifesto, and pay restraints on NHS staff. She stated that Labour would not support the drive to find £22 billion of efficiency savings in the NHS by 2020, as the Party believes it would risk patient safety. The Shadow Health Secretary called for changes in how the NHS handles complaints and whistleblowing cases, reforms to social care funding, and a policy approach that considers the link between economic deprivation and ill-health. She also questioned the role of the independent sector in healthcare. In contrast to Mr Corbyn, she stopped short of proposing stopping the use of the private sector. 

At the conference, the RCS spoke with Ms Alexander for the second time since her appointment in late September. We also met with her Parliamentary adviser Karin Smyth MP, the Nuffield Trust, NHS Providers, Prostate Cancer UK, and the Association of Medical Research Charities. The College held a roundtable event with NHS Providers, a number of other national stakeholders and Angela Smith MP, to discuss the current challenges facing the health service.

Clare Marx encourages role models for women in surgery

Speaking on the Today programme (at 2:44:10) on Thursday, Miss Clare Marx, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, contributed to a discussion on women in surgery. During the interview, Miss Marx emphasised the importance of encouraging female medical students and junior doctors to choose a career in surgery, through role models at the top of their careers demonstrating how surgery is a ‘wonderful career for women’. She also raised the need to address the ‘extremely protracted’ career pathways for surgery, as this can be a barrier, for men and women, to pursuing a surgical career.

In a further statement on a BBC story about female surgeons who ‘face hostility’, Miss Marx said: “Harassment and discrimination experienced by women is clearly unacceptable. This must not be tolerated and be dealt with immediately. However, this does not reflect my and many other women’s positive careers in surgery.”

The RCS runs a ‘Women in Surgery’ group. Through its national and regional campaigns and events, the College supports women in, or considering entering, surgery, providing advice, practical skills and the opportunity to meet other women pursuing a surgical career.

NHS England announces new acute care collaboration vanguard sites

The newly-announced acute care collaboration vanguards are designed to link together local hospitals, into ‘hospital chains’, to improve their clinical and financial viability. The 13 new vanguard sites will be split into three different models: multihospital chains, multisite specialty franchises, and accountable clinical networks.

The multihospital chains will be formed from excellently-performing NHS hospitals, and will merge to create NHS Foundation Groups. The vanguard sites using this model will be: Salford and Wigan Foundation Chain, Northumbria Foundation Group, and Royal Free London.

Multisite specialty franchises will see individual clinical services at local district general hospitals being run on site by specialists from regional centres of excellence. These sites include:

  • Dartford and Gravesham (small District General Hospital making use of specialty franchises)
  • Moorfields (Ophthalmology)
  • National Orthopaedic Alliance (Orthopaedics)
  • The Neuro Network (The Walton, Liverpool) (Neurology and spinal specialty)

Accountable clinical networks will integrate care across district general hospitals and teaching hospitals for key services. Some sites will specialise in cancer services, and will take the recommendation from the Independent Cancer Taskforce to take accountability for a population budget for cancer care. The following sites will be accountable clinical network vanguards:

  • MERIT (Birmingham and Solihull) (Mental Health Accountable Clinical Network)
  • Cheshire and Merseyside Women’s and Children Services (Maternity and Paediatrics Accountable Clinical Network)
  • Royal Marsden, Manchester Cancer and UCLH (Cancer)
  • East Midlands Radiology Consortium (Radiology)
  • Developing ‘One NHS’ in Dorset (Multispecialty)
  • Working Together Partnership (South Yorkshire, North Derbyshire and Mid Yorkshire) (multispecialty)

Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England, commented: “Our new approach to hospital partnerships will help sustain the viability of local hospitals, share clinical and management expertise across geographies, and drive efficiency beyond the walls of individual institutions.”

National Information Board publishes interim report

This week the National Information Board (NIB) published the ‘NIB Prospectus’, an interim review of the Board’s progress. The National Information Board is responsible for implementing work around data and technology in the NHS.  Their report looks at the impact of the NIB’s plans to harness the power of technology and data for health and social care, as set out in its report ‘Personalised Health and Care 2020’.

The Prospectus reports that the NIB work streams have been engaging with key stakeholders over the summer through events across the country. In the coming months they will engage more with patients, industry, the health and social care workforce, and Royal Colleges.

Health economies will produce local digital roadmaps setting out the steps they will take towards paper-free healthcare. To support this, the NIB will provide tools including a ‘digital maturity index’ to measure progress. The aim will be to link data across all NHS episodes of care, including through care.data. A new standard of NHS vigilance will be developed to ensure patients have confidence in the use of their data and are able to decide whether to share it.

The NIB aims to encourage adoption of innovative treatments and diagnostics, and is commissioning research to review the impact of MyNHS on stimulating improvements in care and facilitating comparisons of NHS services. Patients and professionals will be asked to critique the NIB’s progress, and its annual report will be published in March 2016.

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