The full NHS shared planning guidance for 2019/20 was published last week. 2019/20 Operational Planning and Contracting guidance sets out the trust financial regime for 2019/20, alongside the service deliverables including those arising from year one of the NHS Long Term Plan.

The technical guidance for NHS planning 2019/20 includes guidance for operational plans in Annex C. The supplementary finance, activity and workforce planning templates and guidance are also now available on the trust portal and on our website.

In 2018 we commissioned a review of the operational delivery and impact of the patient safety collaborative programme. This report gives its findings and recommendations to strengthen the programme, including greater collective focus on priority workstreams and delivery of the forthcoming patient safety strategy.

The first nursing associates enter the register this month. To help organisations who have included, or are considering including, this new role as part of their workforce, we have published a deployment resource building on the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s standards of proficiency.

This resource outlines recommended procedures on governance, leadership and reporting to assist you to deploy nursing associates into your clinical teams safely and effectively.

Applications for the last cohort of the demand and capacity trainer programme are now open. This free, accredited six-month programme is designed to develop organisations’ internal knowledge and skills in demand and capacity modelling — a key component of a high performing organisation, resulting in reduced waiting times for patients.

The training is in London and is open to all regions. Applications are open until Sunday 10 February.

Our workforce deployment customer service reference group is an opportunity for you to shape and influence what deployment software suppliers provide to the NHS, so you can deploy your clinical staff more productively.

The reference group will meet each month for the next three months as we develop our standard software specification and model contract. Our next meeting is on Wednesday 23 January in London, and you can join in person or dial-in.

NHS England’s clinical guidelines for use in major incidents and mass casualty have been developed following challenging incidents  — such as blast injury, penetrating injury and the use of chemical agents, which are unlike those seen in day-to-day practice.

This guidance includes best practice in the clinical management of such incidents. Medical and nursing directors, please share this with your frontline staff.

NHS Digital is leading an ongoing review of the SHMI to evaluate the potential short and long-term changes to improve the indicator. User feedback, especially from medical directors and mortality and quality leads, is invaluable to this process.

Medical directors — if you or your mortality and quality leads have any questions or comments on the presentational or methodological changes proposed, please send them to clinical.indicators@nhs.net by Monday 4 February and include ‘SHMI review’ in the subject line.