NHS England announces a further £150m to improve patient safety and care
Hospitals are to get a £150 million boost to help improve patient safety and help make the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world.
NHS England has worked with Monitor to adjust the price hospitals are paid to treat patients, in recognition that some hospitals will incur additional costs.
They expect it to be used to both improve safety and ensure patients are treated with care and compassion, such as employing extra nurses. The money is to come out of Clinical Commissioning Groups usual financial settlement.
The change to the tariff, worth approximately £150 million, sits alongside work NHS England is already implementing, such as the recruitment of 5,000 patient safety fellows, establishment of 15 locally-led patient safety groups, re-launch of the patient safety alerts system and the NHS Safety Thermometer data collection, which help inform improvements.
Jane Cummings, Chief Nursing Officer and national director responsible for patient safety for NHS England said:
“Today’s agreement is good news for patients and good news for the NHS. The funding will help hospitals do more to ensure all patients are treated with dignity and compassion, every time.
“It is important that all our hospitals put patient safety first.
“Whilst it is up to providers to agree how they spend this money, I expect that more nurses will be top of the list for many.
“There has been a big debate about staffing levels in hospitals and we need to ensure we get the right number of nurses, in the right place at the right time. Trusts must ensure every part of the hospital has enough nurses and midwives to give patients the best possible care.”
This tariff adjustment is being made for acute services only.
3 comments
Can you please publish more details on how trust’s might ensure they can be considered for this funding.
Regards
I think this is really good news as in seeking extra funding Trust’s priorities are too often that a business case must be financially stand-alone. For patient safety there is often a direct cost with little or no apparent pay back. This means running at risk and a potential of huge liabilities on Trusts but the immediate outlay cost can result in those risks being taken.
Staffing is a very important issue but it is really disappointing that the Director for patient safety as a professional nurse should declare nursing is the key. Thi money will be wasted if it supports minimum nursing staffing levels which are already a Trust’s duty. We need an independent view on prioritisation.
NHS England is in danger of sending mixed messages. On one hand you are saying that there should be more care in the community. Then instead of ploughing money into Primary Care to deal with the underfunding of primary care over the last seven years it is spent on teh acute sector.
By raiding the CCG budgets you are making the provision of community based care as CCG’s will have less money to spend on community based care due to reduced budgets.