Author Archives: wendy

Lottery cash to support area’s carers

Funding will make the whole community more aware of unpaid carers

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Carers in north east Somerset will be able to take more breaks from their caring responsibilities thanks to lottery funding.

The Carers’ Centre charity has won £298,471 from the Big Lottery Fund’s Reaching Communities programme.

Patients to inspect hospitals

‘I want a small army’: Hospitals chief inspector urges patients and ex-doctors to join battle to weed out poor care

  • Squads with doctors and nurses to probe care at all NHS trusts
  • 9 of 11 failing trusts were  passed as safe by Care Quality Commission
  • Chief inspector Sir Mike Richards: ‘I will not tolerate poor or mediocre care’
  • By Sophie Borland and Matt Chorley

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The CQC’s new chief inspector of hospitals, Professor Sir Mike Richards, admitted today the previous CQC inspections had been flawed. He said: ‘We wouldn’t be changing it if it wasn’t.’

Patients, ex-doctors and carers are to be recruited to join a ‘small army’ of hospital inspectors to root-out poor care.

They will form 15-strong squads with doctors and nurses which will carry out thorough investigations of all NHS trusts over the next two years.

“Too big to fail”? Care home closures and the price of market failure

By the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, 15th July 2013

The real human costs of market failure and care home closure for the residents and their families

As the Competition Commission points out in the guidance which it is uses when conducting a market investigation, truly effective markets are characterised by ‘uncertainty, turbulence and change’.

And nowhere has market turbulence been more keenly felt than in the care home sector for older people, which has been subject to the vicissitudes of the market for the past 20 years.  Most recently, the care home chain Southern Cross went into administration as a result of an unsustainable debt financing model.  As the care homes owned by Southern Cross were looking after 31, 000 people, the government was faced with the prospect that nearly 9% of all the available care beds in England would disappear in one fell swoop.