Commissioning
A mental health and wellbeing app developed over the past four years in conjunction with a specialist neurological NHS Trust is being launched into the wider public and private sectors.
Reflective gardens and ‘memory trees’ installed at hospitals in the North Midlands to mark the death of colleagues and loved ones during COVID.
The tree contains the names of those who have died in the past year. The reflective gardens will offer staff at Royal Stoke University Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent, and County Hospital in Stafford, a place to spend their breaks in quiet contemplation. Five staff members have passed away due to COVID-19 and their names have been engraved on the commemorative trees.
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey mental health NHS Trust (BEH) is extending the rollout of Perfect Ward to 12 community teams.
This will include the organisation’s health services in Enfield where the majority of the Trust’s 128,000 patients receive care at home or at local clinics. BEH is a provider of integrated mental health services to a population of 1.2 million. They introduced Perfect Ward’s quality improvement digital technology to transform the way quality and is measured across the large organisation. Since it was introduced, over 300 staff in 45 teams rely on the system to conduct 13 quality audits on mobile devices.
A new clinical video service which supports epilepsy diagnoses and management in the era of coronavirus and beyond has been launched in the UK.
vCreate Neuro allows registered patients and carers to share smartphone-recorded videos of potential seizures or unknown movements with their clinical team via a secure, NHS-trusted system.The data and footage act as a visual aid to assist clinical teams with rapid precision diagnostics, creating a digitised clinical pathway that minimises the need for face-to-face clinic appointments and invasive tests.
A recent poll by Calvert Reconnections indicated that the majority (61%) of case managers are unclear about where brain injury sits in relation to the COVID-19 vaccination programme and the high risk (clinically extremely vulnerable) and moderate risk (clinically vulnerable) categories.
Lorna Mulholland, registered manager at Calvert Reconnections, says there are clear contradictions between the Government, who fund the vaccination programme, and the NHS who are delivering it. “With more than 1 in 3 adults in the UK now vaccinated against COVID-19 one question remains unanswered. Where does acquired brain injury (ABI) sit in relation to the vaccination programme?
Dedicated support for people living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is set to be increased through the addition of more specialist nurses and champions into the NHS and major investment in the development of an advice line.
The MS Trust is the only charity which provides additional specialist MS nurses into the NHS, and while it was forced to pause the initiative at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now set to resume its NHS Specialist Nurse Programme with plans to create five additional roles.
Demelza, 42, sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI), among other multiple injuries, as a pedestrian in an horrific road accident in 2016 when she was hit by a car and it rolled over, crushing her. The first responder arrived on the scene within a minute of a 999 call to find her trapped beneath the vehicle, her heart already in cardiac arrest. It took three minutes for nearby residents to help retrieve her from under the car and then, reportedly, a further five to eight minutes to get her heart started again.
Nearly 20,000 fully qualified staff will be joining the NHS response to the pandemic, helping manage the expected surge in cases. The extra resources now secured by the health service will not only be available to treat coronavirus patients, but will also help the NHS deliver other urgent operations and cancer treatments. The deal – the first of its kind ever – includes the provision of 8,000 hospital beds across England, nearly 1200 more ventilators, more than 10,000 nurses, over 700 doctors and over 8,000 other clinical staff. In London it includes over 2000 hospital beds, and over 250 operating theatres and critical beds.
NHS England and NHS Improvement issued a report last week setting out a series of measures to help remove barriers to the appropriate prescription of medical cannabis on the NHS. The report, commissioned by the government in March, comes amid a farcical situation in the UK in which medical cannabis containing THC has been legalised for certain conditions since November 2018; yet reportedly, just two children have been given NHS prescriptions since. The new measures aim to tackle the current stasis both by helping doctors gain a better understanding of cannabis medicine and speeding up the generation of vital research linking cannabis with various conditions and symptoms.
Thousands of people living with advanced MS are being ‘forgotten’ by the NHS, says charity chief.
