Recent political turmoil has led to the appointment of a new health and social care secretary in the form of Steve Barclay and a new Prime Minister is due to be selected by early September. When new people come into such influential posts, there is a brief chance to seek their attention and enlist their…

Practices have suffered a double blow in the latest NHS pay awards, GP leaders have warned. As reported on Practice Index, most NHS staff, including practice nurses and salaried GPs, have been awarded pay increases of 4.5%. The pay award also recommends that NHS staff under the Agenda for Change (AfC) contract should receive a…

What you need to know as practice managers NHSE have released “Our plan for improving access for patients and supporting general practice”, so what do we need to know as practice managers? This financial year, general practice has provided more appointments than in the equivalent period before the pandemic. There is also an acknowledgement that…

The new National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021 were released quietly and without a fanfare back in April 2021. So much so, I wasn’t even aware of them until a few weeks ago when I thought I should start updating the Infection Prevention and Control Policy and its sister document, the Cleaning Standards and Schedule Policy. Additionally, there’s been…

I am a proud veteran of the Royal Navy and so last week, on Trafalgar Day, I was glad to receive information about a new NHS initiative that supports armed forces families. This new NHS England and NHS Improvements initiative is to look at how families of serving personnel, reservists and veterans access NHS services…

To assist with the changes to the Primary Care Network (PCN) DES, new updated guidance documentation has been published on Practice Index and can be accessed here. While the guidance document goes into more detail, the changes that have been made by NHS England are summarised in their explanatory note dated 19th March 2020, shown…

The integration of health and social care has been the goal of many successive governments – and it’s to see why. The desire to achieve service improvement, a holistic approach, better use of resources and meeting the needs of a changing demographic are compelling reasons for tying together care delivery. Despite the fact that integration…