Kent Health News and Events

The innovation mission

This week the 15 emerging AHSNs have all had their designation confirmed so I will start with a restatement of why AHSNs are needed now.

The country faces economic challenges and needs the UK life sciences sector to grow faster and support the country’s climb out of recession and slow economic growth. Local Government and the NHS face the demands of a growing and ageing population and increasing public expectation. They will be meeting these with ‘flat cash’ or reducing budgets. Their challenge is to do better with less. Doing more of the same is no longer an option in this funding environment. Service transformation is needed. Innovation is the way to meet these challenges..

AHSNs are here to stimulate and identify new innovations for adoption and spread across Kent, Surrey and Sussex as well as spread existing best practice. Strengthening the collaboration between industry, academia, local government and the NHS to stimulate innovation is what we’re about.

Designation feedback

On Monday, David Clayton-Smith and I met with NHS England to be debriefed on our Licensing Panel interview and hear about next steps. We were complimented on having done “exceptionally well” to get the AHSN to where it is in a region that has limited cross-regional infrastructure, so thanks for your role in securing that feedback. We were told that our  progress with Industry has been encouraging and we were encouraged to keep moving in the same direction. Likewise, they recognised that the  Enhancing Quality & Recovery programmes are an asset that could be used to support industry collaboration and the identification and adoption of new innovations as well as the spread of existing best practice.

Next steps include commenting on a draft five year licence to operate, meeting with NHS England to present our business plan and agreeing a contract that assumes NHS England 2013/14 funding of £2.7 million.

Kind regards

Guy Boersma
Managing Director (interim)
Kent, Surrey & Sussex Academic Health Science Network

New Academic Health Science Networks announced

NHS England has today (Thursday 23 May, 2013) confirmed the designation of 15 new Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs).

AHSNs have the potential to transform health and healthcare by putting innovation at the heart of the NHS. This will improve patient outcomes as well as contributing to economic growth.

AHSNs present a unique opportunity to pull together the adoption and spread of innovation with clinical research and trials, informatics, education, and healthcare delivery. They will develop solutions to healthcare problems and get existing solutions spread more quickly by building strong relationships with their regional scientific and academic communities and industry.

NHS England’s Chief Executive, Sir David Nicholson, said: “The NHS is full of brilliant people with brilliant ideas. To spread ideas right across the NHS means working collaboratively with all those who have an interest.

“AHSNs offer a more systematic delivery mechanism so that innovation spreads quickly and successfully through the NHS, making the best possible use of precious NHS resources and in ensuring the most advanced treatments, technologies and medicines are available to patients.”

Read more…

The Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia: Annual report of progress

This progress report sets out the achievements toward delivering major improvements in dementia care and research by 2015. Click here to see the full report.

We’re delighted to have heard this week that Kent Surrey Sussex AHSN will be designated and licensed.

In his letter of congratulations, Sir Ian Carruthers asked us to pass on his thanks to everyone who has been involved in developing the AHSN. Please accept my thanks too.
This gives us momentum to build on what we’ve achieved since our licensing panel interview, highlights of which include:

• Mobilising a region-wide CLAHRC bid (see below)
• Introducing more industry engagement into our Enhanced Recovery programme
• Developing our industry offer with input from European industry accelerator organisations
• Developing for NHS stakeholders, the High Impact Innovations CQUIN pre-qualifier framework
• Measuring and supporting NHS organisations to achieve 100% compliance with NICE Technology Appraisals and developed, with NICE, a three-level definition of compliance to encourage legally compliant providers to be even better
• Introducing patient experience measures in whole system heart failure care covering over 1,000 patients and preparing six e-learning packages for clinicians involved in EQ pathways.

Central funding

I expect to learn more next week about our 2013/14 funding from NHS England, their requirements for match-funding and the implications for our work programme.

Please get in touch with us via email for more information or to get involved.

CLAHRC bid submitted

The CLAHRC bid was submitted on Monday 13 May. Congratulations to Lisa Rodriguez, Sube Banerjee and Tanya Telling for taking the lead on this, supported by our AHSN. That we have produced such a high quality bid, based on a truly collaborative effort across the region, is an important ‘first’ for Kent, Surrey and Sussex and we look forward to learning the outcome later this year.

An important task now is to maintain momentum and build on the cross-KSS relationships we have built over recent weeks.

Kind regards

Guy Boersma
Managing Director (interim)
Kent, Surrey & Sussex Academic Health Science Network

Dementia diagnoses rates must rise, says PM

In a front page report, the Daily Telegraph writes about David Cameron calling for a significant improvement in diagnosis rates for dementia in the next two years. In the run up to the next election the Prime Minister has made tackling the illness one of his main aims and he wants to ensure that two thirds of dementia sufferers are diagnosed by 2015, up from just below 50% at present. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has described the current diagnosis rate as ‘shockingly low’ and he described Cameron’s drive as a ‘major step forward’.

The PM promised to use his presidency of the G8 leaders’ summit to reach an agreement on a new international approach to dementia research, and he will be hosting an international summit on the disease in September. The Daily Mirror reports that Cameron pledged to increase dementia research funding to £66m, while the Sun says the PM has declared that Britain will lead the world’s fight against the disease.

New assessment tool for patients with dementia

A team of specialist pain nurses at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals is introducing a new assessment tool for patients with confusion and dementia. The Bolton Pain Assessment Scale was devised at the Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2011 and is now used at many hospitals nationally. It is designed to enable staff to make a much wider assessment of a patient, rather than simply asking if they are in pain. They can then score different factors to give an overall pain score indicating if the patient has no pain, mild, moderate or severe pain.

Lead pain nurse Harriet Barker said: “Like every acute hospital, we care for many patients with confusion, dementia and also some with learning disabilities. “These conditions can make it much harder for people to vocalise and explain their pain. They may say they do not need any pain killers, but often do not really understand the pain they are in or how the medication will make it better.” She said that using the Bolton Pain Assessment Scale is a very common sense approach.

Read more…

NHS to be fully integrated with social care ‘by 2018’

The health and social care system in England will be fully joined together by 2018, with CCGs urged to put aside 2% of their funding each year to encourage more integrated care, the government has pledged. The bold plans aim to prevent patients ‘falling through the cracks’, with new ‘pioneer’ areas around the country – to be announced in September – to trial more integrated care for patients with local providers, including GPs.

The national ‘shared commitment’ to integrating care, will be unveiled by health and care minister Norman Lamb today, with ten ways that each NHS organisation will work towards joining up their services with other local services. The plans come despite an official evaluation of 16 Department of Health pilots looking at more integrated care published last year concluding they had a broadly negative effect on patient satisfaction and did not deliver any tangible cost savings.

A DH statement said: ‘The document lays out how local areas should use existing structures like Health and Wellbeing Boards to bring together local authorities, the NHS, social care providers, education, housing services, public health and others to bring about better integration of local services.’

Read more…

International clinical trials day

International Clinical Trials day is on Monday 20 May. The ‘OK to ask’ campaign, run by the National Institute for Health Research, is encouraging people to ask their doctor about participating in clinical trials.

Read more …

I am writing this following last week’s South East Coast Clinical Senate and Strategic Clinical Networks (SCNs) stakeholder and planning event. For those who weren’t there, you can access the slides from the day and learn more about the four Strategic Clinical Networks which cover:

• cancer
• cardiovascular disease (heart, stroke, renal and diabetes)
• maternity, children and young people”s services
• mental health, dementia and neurological conditions

They complement our objective of spreading existing best practice faster and getting new innovations adopted quicker.  And we complement the SCNs’ vision  of providing “prioritised advice, strategic planning and quality improvement support to drive out inappropriate variation to improve quality and outcomes of patient care”.

So it is helpful to reiterate the commitment to joint working between the Clinical Senate, SCNs and KSS AHSN.  By working efficiently and effectively together we will avoid duplication and play to each others’ strengths. We will support the Strategic Clinical Networks to succeed by providing full access to the Enhancing Quality & Recovery processes and events to spread existing best practice and by providing better arrangements for industry liaison, identifying new innovations and speeding up their path from innovator’s bench to patient bedside.

KSS AHSN, the Clinical Senate and the SCNs share an interest in research and involving both patients and the public in shaping healthcare. We will all seek to establish a strong alliance with Health Education England in Kent Surrey and Sussex to support workforce development as innovation transforms patient pathways. Working with universities and ensuring the adoption of research following robust evaluation is another area of potential collaboration.

For further information on the Clinical Senate and the SCNs please contact Deborah Tomalin, Associate Director, South East Coast Clinical Senate and Strategic Clinical Networks, NHS England.

Final countdown to KSS CLAHRC bid

Following a tremendous effort by colleagues from across the region, led by Sube Banerjee, our Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) bid is nearing completion. We will be submitting the application to NIHR by the deadline on Monday 13th May through the lead NHS organisation, Sussex Partnership NHS FT. Pledges of support and matched funding have been received from many NHS organisations and from all eight universities involved in health related activities, as well as from KSS AHSN and Health Education England KSS.

A one-page summary of our proposals can be found here. This has been a truly collaborative undertaking across KSS and we have identified significant areas of research strengths along the way, forging new partnerships which will stand the region in good stead for the future.

Kind regards

Guy Boersma
Managing Director (interim)
Kent, Surrey & Sussex Academic Health Science Network

Are accident and emergency attendances increasing?

Pressures on accident and emergency (A&E) departments hit the headlines last week, with the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition trading statistics across the despatch box at Prime Minister’s Question Time. But what are the facts about A&E attendances?

Figure 1 shows trends in attendances in English NHS A&E units over the past 26 years. The topline trend shows that for 15 years – from 1987/8 to 2002/3 – attendances were essentially unchanged at around 14 million per year. But in 2003/4 they jumped – by nearly 18 per cent – to 16.5 million, and rose to 21.7 million by 2012/13. This is an overall rise of around 7.5 million (a 50 per cent increase) over the past decade.
Read more.

NHS England announces plan to tackle A&E waiting times

NHS England has told its local area teams to prepare a plan by the end of the month to tackle waiting times in A&E departments, including how primary care and other services can ease the rising pressure on emergency services. NHS chiefs also said today that they will publish a plan over the next week about how they will support local commissioners and when they will intervene if a CCG is failing to control demand for urgent care services. The move comes after a political row over waiting times at A&E departments, with Jeremy Hunt blaming ‘poor primary care provision’ for a rise in A&E attendances since the 2004 GP contract allowed GPs to opt out of out-of-hours care provision.
Read more.

The AHSN has a broad remit, with some responsibilities that overlap with others (e.g. the various research and clinical networks). We also have a particular remit to strengthen collaboration between industry and the NHS and have a couple of April events focused on this.
On 24 April, we have organised a session on industry accelerators, to learn from others and support our entry into this space. Accelerators provide support, advice and mentoring to organisations looking to move into their next stage of development.
Some focus on start-ups, often taking an equity stake in organisations in return for providing funding to develop their new product and bridge the time gap before sales revenues flow in.
Our focus is on more established organisations, SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises), in part because Kent, Surrey and Sussex has the richest density of health technology SMEs with over 700 companies based in the patch.
The 24 April is a well-subscribed invitation-only evening event, where with help from the South East Health Technologies Alliance (SEHTA), we have pulled together delegates with significant UK and overseas experience in this area. If you would like to get involved in the follow-on work please contact me and have a look at the website of our overseas delegates Medicalps.
On 23 April, we have a clinical collaborative evening on adopting best practice in intraoperative fluid management, one of the nationally identified High Impact Innovations. We are bringing key industry players together with customers and potential customers. We are asking Industry participants to come and explore the potential to strengthen their export credentials, create wealth and local jobs. We are asking NHS participants to come and share their experience as customers and why NICE endorsements don’t automatically translate into increased adoption of particular technologies. Our interest is in getting best practice adopted faster and help UK PLC to grow.
Finally, on a separate note, we have an initial workshop on information on 18 April, with delegates attending from industry, academia and the NHS and follow-on activity planned which I will share in future e-mail updates.
Kind regards,

Guy Boersma
Managing Director (interim)
Kent, Surrey & Sussex Academic Health Science Network

The new structure of the NHS in England

The Health and Social Care Act (2012) paved the way for far-reaching reforms to how patient care in the English NHS is organised, managed and delivered. The changes were formally implemented on 1 April 2013.
This slideshow outlines the main changes to management, accountability and funding structures resulting from the Act.

Dementia 2013: the hidden voice of loneliness

This second annual report on how well people with dementia are living found that over half of the general public believe that people with dementia have a bad quality of life. Click here for more information.