QIPP, Efficiency & Savings

Government announces £25m Brexit medicines ‘express freight service’

15.08.19: In the event of a No Deal Brexit, the Government has announced the setting up of a high-speed freight service to ferry medicine to the UK from France. A £25m contract has been announced by government ministers for an ‘expre...

Hospitals set to receive £850m additional funding revealed

05.08.19: Prime minister Boris Johnson announced this weekend that there was to be a one-off £1.8bn capital investment made to hospitals in England. As part of that financial boost, 20 NHS trusts across England were set to receive their share o...

NHS Providers welcome capital investment announcement

05.08.19: NHS Providers have welcomed capital investment into the healthcare service, but have warned that to ensure long-term improvements can be delivered this funding must continue. Prime minister Boris Johnson announced over the weekend an a...

NHS SBS: Insourcing in the NHS

02.08.19: Featured in July/August issue of NHE   Phil Davies, procurement director at NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS), explains how insourcing clinical services is one way NHS hospitals are looking to meet growing patient demand and red...

NHS set to open new distribution centre in Suffolk

15.07.19: A vast new NHS warehouse and distribution centre is set to be opened in Suffolk, serving East Anglia and the South East and storing everything from bandages to surgical equipment. The warehouse, located on the Suffolk Park complex in Bury S...

Health Secretary launches trial payment system for new antibiotics

09.07.19: Health secretary Matt Hancock has officially launched the trial of a world-first subscription-style payment system for pharmaceutical companies to incentivise the creation of new antibiotics. The new programme is aimed at encouraging d...

Sacha Yoga Life can help to stretch NHS budgets further

21.06.19: Today, the day of the summer solstice, is also the International Day of Yoga. It’s easy to see why 21 June would be chosen to celebrate this ancient, spiritual practice, given that the solstice has been revered as a spiritual, mystical event...

Getting it right for Personal Health Budgets

04.06.19: Claudia Martínez, research manager at Reform, recently co-authored a report on personal budgets in public services. Here, she outlines the things commissioners must consider when implementing Personal Health Budgets (PHBs). The NHS e...

NHS Counter Fraud: Who cares about ISO 17025:2005?

03.06.19: We do, writes Nikki Crook, technical lead of the NHS Counter Fraud Authority’s (NHSCFA) Forensic Computing Unit (FCU). I work for the NHSCFA, which is leading the fight against NHS fraud at the national level. Our dedicated FCU suppor...

Cannabis on trial

30.05.19: How will the NHS conduct accurate trials of cannabis-based medicinal products when everyone has already tried cannabis? Dr David Horn, medical director at the Centre for Medicinal Cannabis, reports. Until November 2018, cannabis was a Sched...

Mid Yorks Hospitals NHS Trust: Our improvement journey

28.05.19: Chief executive of the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, Martin Barkley, writes for NHE to guide us through his trust’s improvement journey. It’s arguably a hackneyed phrase in the NHS, but Mid Yorkshire really has been on a si...

Pharmaceutical firms accused of illegally colluding to drive up drug prices, ‘costing the NHS millions’

24.05.19: Four pharmaceutical firms have been accused of illegally colluding to restrict the supply of an anti-nausea tablet, drastically driving up prices by 700%, the competition watchdog has alleged. Between December 2013 and December 2017, the co...

London trust and CCG to appoint first joint leader in new shared working plans

15.05.19: A London trust and CCG have published new plans to increase the level of joint working between Croydon’s NHS services by appointing a new single joint leader. Croydon Health Services Trust and Croydon CCG have announced their ambition...

NHS lost £212m from prescription fraud last year whilst 1.7m people wrongly fined, NAO finds

15.05.19: Around 1.7 million fines have been wrongly handed out to patients and then overturned in the last five years, whilst the NHS also lost £212m last year due to wrongly claimed exemptions, the National Audit Office (NAO) has found. The n...

NHS set to launch global recruitment strategy to bring in thousands of foreign nurses

07.05.19: The NHS is set to begin a global recruitment drive to recruit tens of thousands of foreign nurses over the next five years in a bid to fill a void of 40,000 skilled workers. According to the staffing strategy, seen by The Times, NHS Improve...