This report is a flexible summary, with the aim of sharing and highlighting a wide range of data and policy information relating to London general practice published in a given week. Where we view information to be of significant interest it is reproduced directly below the links to make the key points quicker to digest.
Please feel free to share any useful stats/links you think we could include in future reports.
Official bodies
NHS Digital
- All recent data releases can be seen here.
- Letter:NHS emergency preparedness, resilience and response exercise programme 2024 to 2030 [13/8].
- Letter: NHS response to 2024 riots [12/8].
- Guidance:National infection prevention and control[13/8].
- Data: NHS England service codes by year 2024/25 [14/8].
- Letter: Preparations for an Autumn/Winter 2024/25 flu and COVID-19 seasonal campaign [15/8].
Department of Health and Social Care
- Guidance: Care Act 2014: supporting implementation [12/8].
- Press release: Health and Social Care Secretary responds to CQC review [13/8].
UK Health Security Agency
- Press release:New RSV vaccine could prevent 5,000 infant hospitalisations [13/8].
- Guidance: Lassa fever: origins, reservoirs, transmission and guidelines [15/8].
- Guidance: Flu vaccines: 2024 to 2025 flu season [16/8].
- Flu vaccines available for the 2024 to 2025 flu season and the clinical risk groups that they apply to.
- News: WHO declares mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern [15/8]. BMA
Policy, think tanks, charities and representative bodies
Nuffield Trust
- AI and the NHS: is it the silver bullet that will improve the health service’s productivity? [15/8].
- There are continued hopes that artificial intelligence will help solve some of the NHS’s problems.
- What must be taken into consideration?
- There are practical considerations related to the limitations of the NHS’s existing legacy information infrastructure. AI development requires access to large volumes of patient data.
- There are regulatory considerations related to the need to ensure that AI used in the NHS is safe and effective. Currently, it is unclear how exactly to validate and evaluate the performance of an AI system intended to be used for clinical care.
- There are ethical considerations related to the risk that, unless carefully managed, the implementation of AI might undermine the NHS’s core values: patient centredness, for all, based on need, not ability to pay.
- How are hospital services used at the end of life? [14/8].
- This blog examines how hospital services are used by people at the end of life – covering from the year before the Covid pandemic until August 2023, using data covering a population of 24 million people linking GP clinical records, hospital data and death registrations.
- The pandemic caused huge disruption to health services. Hospital services geared up to accept Covid patients, but emergency admissions in fact fell sharply overall during the first Covid wave and have only recently recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
The King’s Fund
- Why I’m optimistic about the NHS’s ability to tackle poverty despite the stats [14/8].
- Author Julia Cream feels strangely optimistic about the NHS’s ability to tackle both poverty and poverty stigma, despite the concerns she set out in her earlier blog about how the NHS contributes to the stigma that surrounds adult poverty.
London Trusts
Barts Health NHS Trust
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust