Good afternoon and welcome to my latest patient safety update. This week we round up the most interesting coverage of the Ockenden Report, the latest on the Health and Care Bill, and the recent Select Committee report on cancer services.

OCKENDEN REVIEW Now that the dust has settled I thought it might be worth picking out some of the most interesting takes on Donna Ockenden’s review. There is widespread concern, best put by PSW Trustee James Titcombe here, that the NHS hasn’t learned lessons from previous inquiries as many of the messages were all too familiar. Lots of people also warned that there’s still no plan to address the staffing shortages that were at the heart of Ockenden’s final report. Evidence of just how ingrained the ‘normal birth’ ideology is was picked up by the Telegraph where it highlighted a number of job adverts that made reference to it. Finally, it is sadly worth remembering that we also have independent reviews underway in Kent and Nottingham and the Mail warned other Trusts have lower C-section rates that Shrewsbury and Telford. Important too to mention that although it feels depressingly like ‘deja vu’ following Morecambe Bay, many of the incidents pre-date those in that report and neonatal deaths have fallen 36% in the last decade so we are making progress.

CANCER WARNING The Select Committee has published a very critical report on cancer services in England arguing that the government is “not on track to meet its target on early cancer diagnosis”. Failure to make progress towards this target could mean 340,000 people between 2019 and 2028 missing out on an early cancer diagnosis putting thousands of lives at risk. The Committee’s expert panel rated overall progress towards these targets as “inadequate” which it has not done before. Once again it is the workforce crisis that is crucial to addressing this as the Committee found no detailed plan to address the shortages in oncologists, consultant pathologists, radiologists and specialist cancer nurses. Sajid Javid I think senses not all is right in this area given his decision to announce there will be a new 10 year plan and a Nixonian ‘war on cancer.’

WORKFORCE AMENDMENT Thanks to Baroness Cumberlege and others the House of Lords voted yesterday to put a slightly revised version of the workforce amendment back into the Health and Care Bill. Under the Bill that has now been returned to the House of Commons workforce projections would be published every three years rather than two and would look only 15 years into the future rather than 20. This was in an effort to address concerns the government had regarding the burden of carrying this work out and to align it with other government plans. If the government continues to view this particular measure unfavourably then I really hope they come up with some other form of approach when the Bill is next to debated. The Health Secretary told the Today Programme this morning (2 hours 14 minutes in) that he has ordered a long term plan to tackle this issue but we still have no details on when or what this will involve (and it was due before Christmas). With the Health and Social Care Levy coming into force today the government has published some more detail on what the £500m on social care workforce will go on – this is obviously welcome but nowhere near enough in terms of funding or ambition.

COVID LATEST Sadly the ONS reported a further increase in the number of cases in England as they reached 1 in 13 people in the week ending 26th March. The Covid dashboard on the other hand continues to report a decline in cases over the last 7 days, today showing a 26% decrease. Hospital admissions have increased though and the total number in hospital with Covid now standards at over 20,000. Hopefully the decrease in new cases being shown by the dashboard will feed into both the ONS numbers and hospital admissions soon - and privately senior NHS leaders are confident we have passed the worst.

THE SALES PITCH Even in a quieter week some really significant news to report so please do sign up to receive this update via our website here and tell any friends to do the same!

Jeremy Hunt