By John Tingle The National Health Service (NHS) in England’s quality regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has recently published a highly critical report on the way patient deaths are investigated in the NHS. The investigation follows events at the Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust where a number of failings were identified in the way…
By Brad Segal Amidst a roller-coaster presidential campaign, on November 4th the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) presented a plan to change resident duty hour limits. That the specifics have largely flown under the radar is perhaps unsurprising given the current news cycle. But the understated revision to, “Resident Duty Hours in The Learning and…
By John Tingle BBC News reported, 24/11/2016 on the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust review of its Royal Oldham and North Manchester General hospitals which identified several ‘unacceptable situations’. The BBC news item states that the review document “…described how a premature baby had arrived “just before the legal age of viability” – at 22…
The Football Players Health Study at Harvard University today released a set of legal and ethical recommendations to address a series of structural factors that affect NFL player health. The Football Players Health Study is a research initiative composed of several ongoing studies examining the health and wellbeing of NFL players. The newly released report,…
By Wendy S. Salkin On Wednesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS)—an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—released a final rule that “will revise the requirements that Long-Term Care facilities [LTCs] must meet to participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs” (1). (Almost all LTCs receive funds from Medicare or Medicaid.) This is…
By John Tingle Patients are very much the weaker party in the care equation. Doctors and nurses are always in a much more powerful position as they have the command of a discrete, specialised body of professional knowledge which the patient has not got and often urgently needs. To make the National Health Service (NHS) much…
By Matthew H. H. Young What will happen to the current medical malpractice system under a single-payer system? To answer this question, I started by looking at the information provided by Physicians for a National Health Program, whose mission is to replace the ACA (Affordable Care Act) with single-payer. On their website under Single-Payer FAQs, it…
By John Tingle There is a new report from Health Service Ombudsman (HSO) on GP (General Medical Practitioner) complaint handling and major failings are revealed. The HSO makes the final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved in England and lies at the apex of the NHS complaints system. The report reveals that some GP…
By Michael Anne Kyle In recent days there has been a lot of action around CMS’ Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative (CPCI). First, the next phase of the program was announced, expanding the program in size and scope. Several days later, an evaluation of the first two years of the initiative was published in the New…
By Katherine Kwong The news for blood testing company Theranos has gotten even worse since this blog’s last discussion of the company’s woes. Despite the company’s statements at the end of March that it would correct all of the issues CMS had found, new reports have emerged that Theranos’ California lab may see its federal…
