Here are the health-related links that have caught our eyes between June 20th and July 11th:

• McKinsey’s unhealthy profits | Red Pepper– It has certainly offered to share information gained from its work on privatisation for the Department of Health with private health companies seeking business from the department, as revealed in emails obtained by Spinwatch under the Freedom of Information Act.Each of the firm’s 400 senior partners is estimated to make between £3 million and £6 million a year, and ‘junior directors’ over £1 million. Partners and other McKinsey staff regularly take senior jobs inside government. Dr David Bennett, a former senior partner, became chief of policy and strategy for Tony Blair from 2005 to 2007, and is now chairman and acting chief executive of Monitor, which will regulate the new healthcare market and play a crucial role in offering NHS business to private companies. Continue reading →

These are my links for May 21st through June:

• Learning Disabiity Nursing – News, Practice and Research for Nurses – NEWS, PRACTICE AND DISCUSSION FORUMS FOR LEARNING DISABILITY NURSES
• BBC News – ‘Shocking discrimination’ in mental health services– The Mental Health Policy Group from the London School of Economics said three-quarters of people with depression or anxiety got no treatment.The committee of senior academics and medical professionals described this as a “real scandal”. Continue reading →

These are my links for May 17th through May 21st:

• Protection of Biometric Information of Children in Schools: Consultation on draft advice for Proprietors, Governing Bodies, Head Teachers, Principals and School Staff, Young people, Parents and Representative bodies – e-Consultations – Department for – The purpose of this consultation is to gather views on a Department for Education draft advice document intended to explain the legal duties schools and colleges have if they use automated biometric recognition systems.
• Sport Participation Measurement – Consultation on proposed changes – Sport Participation Measurement – Consultation on proposed changes

  DCMS and Sport England wish to consult with users and other interested parties on proposals to change the way sport is measured in the Taking Part and Active People surveys.

• Neighbourhood Statistics – Home Page –
• The Justice Gap –
• NHS Cuts Route Finder – Google Maps –

These are my links for May 16th through May 17th:

• Dr Lucy Reynolds | LinkedIn –
• What we know so far… – The British Medical Association –
• (24) Birmingham Keep Our NHS Public –
• Mothers left alone in labour, midwives warn – Telegraph – One in four new mothers said they were left alone without a midwife during labour, the Royal College of Midwives has warned.
• With a little help from a site | Wobbing –

These are my links for May 8th through May 9th:

• NHS risk register’s publication vetoed by cabinet | Society | The Guardian – A spokesperson for the information commissioner, Christopher Graham, said he would need to be certain that the cabinet had followed rules that say the veto should be used only in cases meeting "exceptional" criteria for non-disclosure.

  "We will need to study the secretary of state's statement of reasons for imposing the ministerial veto in this case. These must, under the criteria established by the government, be 'exceptional'. We will present the commissioner's formal report on the matter to parliament next week", the spokesperson said.

• Dentists ‘inventing work to defraud NHS’ – Health News – Health & Families – The Independent – Among the rogue practices were submitting false claims for more treatment than had been carried out and submitting claims on behalf of patients do not exist.

  Claims for ‘ghost patients’ were the most blatant in a catalogue of illegal practices uncovered by an audit of 5,000 dentists’ invoices examined by NHS Protect, the anti-fraud unit of the health service.

  Overall, 3 per cent of claims examined were deemed to be fraudulent, indicating that dishonest dentists defrauded the NHS out of £73.1m in 2009-2010, when the check was made. By 2014, the NHS could lose a further £146.3m unless the deception was halted, the report, Dental Contractor Loss Analysis Exercise, published today.

  The Conservatives claimed the losses exposed in the report stemmed from a new NHS contract introduced by Labour in 2006. Labour blamed the dentists for swindling the taxpayer and called for tougher action from regulators.

• Cameras to monitor hospital staff | Society | The Guardian – The trust will undertake a three-month free-of-charge pilot before deciding whether to make this surveillance of working practices permanent. Its first-year cost would be close on £200,000 for the cameras and monitoring services if it leased the 30 cameras. If it did not put them in the operating theatre the first year cost would fall to around £37,000.
• The Patient Paradox part 3: Expert patients – The EPP was evaluated by a team from the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre, which was closed in 2010.4 In 2004, the centre published an evaluation of the EPP programme as it stood. Some of the comments are particularly illuminating. For example, on the naming of the programme, as noted by one of its administrators:
  ‘Even the patients, for want of a better term, themselves have said that they don't like it because they say that just because they've got some sort of disability or disease doesn't mean that they're a patient. They don't see it as ‘we're all prospective patients' they see themselves as being labelled again. And of course the GPs and the consultants don't like the ‘expert' part of it because they don't see it in terms of that beautiful quote that was in the document, you know, which I think was something like ‘my patients understand (their) disabilities better than I do'. They don't see it in those terms, they see it in a threatening ‘I know what's best,
• BBC News – Hampshire and City of London police reveal body part retention – Two police forces kept body parts and tissue samples in 89 suspicious and unexplained death cases without notifying relatives, it has emerged.

  Hampshire Police kept tissue samples of 82 people as part of the investigations into their deaths, while City of London Police kept samples in seven cases.

  The cases were revealed after Freedom of Information (FOI) requests by the BBC to all English and Welsh forces.

• BBC News – Pupils abuse hundreds of teachers in Devon schools – More than 300 teachers in Devon were abused by pupils in 2011, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

  Although none of the injuries were serious, some of the 301 teachers needed time off work to recover.

• BBC News – Overpaid academy schools must return £15m by July – Figures obtained under a freedom of information request show 128 academies have been overpaid by the government.

  On average, each affected school must pay back almost £118,000, according to UHY Hacker Young Accountants.

• The Cost of Childcare – a regional view « Student Parents – The Childcare Act of 2006 requires local authorities in England and Wales to ensure there is sufficient childcare for working parents and those in training or education. Due to these changes in the last two decades there are now more available and affordable childcare options available. However, the recent public spending cuts have meant that the amount parents can claim to cover childcare costs has fallen from 80% to 70% in April 2011 meaning a loss of £10.47 per week,£544 per year in funds towards childcare. This combined with the cuts to Family Information Services and Sure Start Funding means 2012 could be a tight year for some families regarding childcare. The Daycare Trust conduct an annual survey of local authorities in order to build a comprehensive list of childcare costs across the country. They received 160 responses for the 2012 survey, a 77% response rate overall.

These are my links for May 3rd through May 6th:

• Long-awaited NHS information strategy ‘could mean better data linking’ | Guardian Government Computing | Guardian Professional – "People don't just want to see raw datasets, they don't just want to see raw information, they want to see information and data that's linked together across a number of care settings that starts to link input data with output data," he told the HC2012 conference in London. "For example, what does somebody do to something in terms of an intervention, and what difference does it make?"

  Providing more linked data would allow the health service to demonstrate good practice, as well as helping to transform health and social care, he told delegates.

  The NHS Information Centre is set to launch a GP data extraction service from September. Straughan said it will start a flow of GP data across the whole of the NHS, allowing it to answer specific questions around GP data.

• First private company to run NHS hospital could bring in ‘eye watering cuts’ – Telegraph – However, the Health Service Journal obtained a letter from Lord Howe, the Health Minister, to Lord Haskel, a Labour peer, in the House of Commons library showing how any surplus would be split between profit for Circle and paying back the NHS debt.
  Lord Howe explained that the first £2 million of surplus in any financial year would go straight to Circle, while it would take a quarter of surpluses between £2 million and £6 million, and a third between £6 million and £10 million.
• SaferMobile » Mobile Security Survival Guide for Journalists –
• Sketching Sponsor Partners Running UK Clinical Trials « OUseful.Info, the blog… –
• GPs pressured not to send patients to hospital: survey – Telegraph – Research by GP magazine has found that more than half of GPs had experienced 'inappropriate demands' from local NHS managers to send fewer patients to hospital.
  The NHS is struggling to save £20bn in order to cope with rising demand for healthcare with more modest increases in budgets than in previous years.
  The doctors described the ‘constant pressure to justify referrals and admissions, and pressure to avoid them’.

These are my links for April 30th through May 2nd:

• https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/whatdotheyknow_-_local_gov_foi_requests_with_sprea/?typ=university –
• Doctors back denial of treatment for smokers and the obese | Society | The Observer – Some 54% of doctors who took part said the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment from patients who do not lose weight or stop smoking. Some medics believe unhealthy behaviour can make procedures less likely to work, and that the service is not obliged to devote scarce resources to them.

  However, senior doctors and patient groups have voiced alarm at what they call "blackmailing" of the sick, and denial of their human rights.

  Doctors.net.uk, a professional networking site, found that 593 (54%) of the 1,096 doctors who took part in the self-selecting survey answered yes when asked: "Should the NHS be allowed to refuse non-emergency treatments to patients unless they lose weight or stop smoking?"

• Strengthening The Commitment: The Report of the UK Modernising Learning Disabilities Nursing Review – Strengthening The Commitment: The Report of the UK Modernising Learning Disabilities Nursing Review
• info4local – Information for local government – Department of Health: Choice of GP practice – Guidance for a – This guidance is for all primary care trusts on the broader aspects of the policy on widening patient choice of GP practices. It sets out the new provisions in legislation relating to practice boundaries and the revised list closure procedure.
• NHS reforms to cost West Midlands primary care trusts £363m – Health News – News – Birmingham Post – The potential cost of the reforms is revealed in documents which show primary care trusts have been ordered to hold back two per cent of their budgets for two years in a row.

  A draft copy of the business case for the health reforms – which has not been published officially, but has been obtained by Labour – states that the changes will cut administrative costs in the NHS by a third, allowing an extra £1.5 billion a year to be spent on front line services by 2014-15.

  In the meantime, local authorities are being asked to hold back £1.6 billion to pay for the reforms – for two years running.

• Birmingham City Council sued for £1,750 after toilet seat collapsed – West Midlands News – News – Birmingham Post – The council said it couldn’t give any further details about the payouts, but its figures – released under the Freedom of Information Act – did reveal the average payout for April to December was around £3,753.

  A Birmingham City Council spokesman defended the pay-outs and said their legal department dealt with an average of 100 employer liability personal injury claims every year.

  “Over the period concerned the council employed up to 48,000 individuals,” he added.

  “The claims brought against the council represent around 0.4 per cent of the council’s workforce.