Help Me Investigate Health has been live-tweeting today from Sandwell Health’s Other Economic Summit (SHOES) at The Public in West Bromwich. Audio of the morning ‘Dragons’ Den’ panel can be found at http://audioboo.fm/tag/shoes10; a liveblog can be found here.
These are my links for May 8th through May 9th:
"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.
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.
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.
Although none of the injuries were serious, some of the 301 teachers needed time off work to recover.
On average, each affected school must pay back almost £118,000, according to UHY Hacker Young Accountants.
So to paraphrase Loyd Grossman I’ve deliberated, cogitated and digested my donor data and thought I’d share some of the big themes and patterns I’ve noticed.
First, with its current total standing at 18.45m members, the register has grown massively since its computerised and centralised debut in 1994 – in that year it had just 104k signees.
These are my links for May 3rd through May 6th:
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.
These are my links for April 30th through May 2nd:
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?"
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.
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.
Tony Hirst writes about how he analysed GP data on his OUseful blog (get the data here).
You might want to combine this with the GP patient lists and QOF data previously published on Help Me Investigate Health.
Since I last posted, I’ve been immersed in donor data – trying to tease out some interesting trends and perhaps, more importantly, attempting to find out what’s behind them.
I have data going right back to the computerised register’s inception in 1994. And without too much investigation, I can see that take-up has massively plateaued in the last three or four years; a huge peak in the mid-90s has calmed to a mere undulation, even with extra publicity for the register and the mushrooming of joining methods.
In the last post I introduced you to my data project on the organ donor register – and since then, the topic has cropped up again in the news agenda. Via a Google Alert, I electonically stumbled across an impassioned campaign by the Glasgow Evening Times to change Scottish donation laws so consent is presumed unless a person specifically opts out. The paper has accompanied its vociferous championing with a series of stirring case-study pieces.
Which brings me back to my data.
The Independent has been running an in-depth series on the ‘crisis in nursing’, by Christina Patterson. It’s a useful read if you want to understand how the profession and the wider NHS have changed through the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as how to tackle a big subject from various angles (historical perspective; case study; personal experiences; training; culture).
Links and key passages with contacts and reports in bold below:
Data journalism is all about pure facts and figures but you need a vested emotional interest in the information in order to bring it alive. For various reasons, the donor register is something I’ve been curious about for a while. Not so much its existence per se, but rather the profile of who is – and who isn’t – on it.
I’m just about to embark on a data project based on the register and will be doing a series of posts. I thought I’d kick off this entry by talking a little about why I chose this topic and what I hope to gain.
