Last year the Care Quality Commission's risk rating for the Royal Berkshire Hospital put the hospital in the highest band of risk. As a result an early inspection was scheduled which is due to start on the 24th March. In the meantime, the Care Quality Commission has published its most recent risk rating of the hospital - which has put it in the next to lowest risk band - 5 out of 6. The Care Quality Commission's risk rating system is called "Intelligent Monitoring". It's a good thing they told us that otherwise we might have thought differently.

The Patients Association, the patients' advocacy group founded by the late Claire Rayner, invites you to answer a questionnaire about NHS services online that you may have used. If you have used websites such as choose and book or access to your online records please help the Patients' Association with their project. Please click here to take part. You can find out more about the Patients Association at their website.

The board of the South Reading NHS Clinical Commissioning Group meets in public at 9am-12:30pm on Wednesday, 19th March at the Museum of English Life on Redlands Road. The Agenda and Papers are available on the South Reading CCG website. If you would like to attend and if you have questions to submit, which should relate to the agenda, please email SouthReadingCCG@nhs.net to arrive by 12 noon on 18th March. The matters to be discussed include: 

1. Chair's Report
2. Five year strategic plan
3. Two year operational Plan
4. Better Care Fund - Pooled social care and health funding
5. Quality and Performance Reports

This meeting starts at 9am so get your porridge on early!

The NHS body which supervises healthcare trusts, Monitor, has closed its investigation into A&E waits at the Royal Berks. The investigation was opened last August after the Royal Berks A&E department had breached the target for 95% of attendees to be seen within 4-hours three times in 21 months. Investigators were satisfied with the Royal Berks' measures to improve the situation. These include an expansion providing eight new bays in the A&E department. Paul Streat, regional director at Monitor, said: We have looked very closely at how this trust is being run and we have decided that its management is taking the necessary steps to improve its performance for patients." Not only are more people attending the Royal Berkshire Hospital's A&E department, but their problems are more serious ones. At the last hospital board meeting Dr Sue Edees, urgent care director, highlighted the fact that the percentage of patients being treated for major conditions in the emergency department has risen by 30 per cent to 65 per cent in the last 12 months.

The Care Quality Commission is asking for members of the public who have received treatment from the Royal Berks Hospital Foundation Trust over the past year to give their feedback as part of their inspection of the hospital trust. This includes the main Royal Berkshire Hospital site in Reading plus the Prince Charles Eye Unit, West Berkshire Community Hospital, Windsor Dialysis Unit and Royal Berkshire Bracknell Clinic (continues) 

1. Until 7th March you can complete the simple survey online at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KB67J6M
2. Attend the public listening event at the Victoria Hall, Town Hall, Blagrave Street, Reading, RG1 1QH at 6:30 pm on Monday, 24th March. Please register online at http://www.cqc.org.uk/public/listening-events#berkshire
3. Call the CQC customer services team on 030000 616161 to talk to someone about the inspection (open from 8:30am to 5pm).
4. Email the CQC in relation to the inspection at enquiries@cqc.org.uk
5. Write to the CQC at 
   
   CQC, National Customer Service Centre, Citygate, Gallowgate, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4PA 
   
    

We will be meeting between 6pm and 7:30pm on Wednesday, 26th February 2014 at the University Health Centre, 9, Northcourt Avenue, Reading RG2 7HE The main feature is expected to be a presentation on the PALS (Patient Advice and Liaison Service) at the Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust. There will also be an update on the Better Care Fund - the local NHS-funded social care programme - and on the CCG's progress with planning and public consultation. News from local practice Patient Groups will be welcome. All members welcome - to join please use the form on this web site or contact the South Reading CCG by phone on 0118 921 3840 and ask to be a member of the South Reading Patient Voice.

We will be meeting between 6pm and 7:30pm on Wednesday, 26th February 2014 at the University Health Centre, 9, Northcourt Avenue, Reading RG2 7HE The main feature is expected to be a presentation on the PALS (Patient Advice and Liaison Service) at the Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust. There will also be an update on the Better Care Fund - the local NHS-funded social care programme - and on the CCG's progress with planning and public consultation. News from local practice Patient Groups will be welcome. All members welcome - to join please use the form on this web site or contact the South Reading CCG by phone on 0118 921 3840 and ask to be a member of the South Reading Patient Voice.

Surveys and statistics are essential tools in identifying patterns of disesase, effectiveness of treatments and care, and in suggesting new treatments to medical research. The power of modern computing and statistic applied to this data is currently termed Big Data. The NHS has a developing programme called Care.Data to gather patient data from all GP surgeries in England. The data is to be used in health services management, preventative medicine and medical research. After some public concern and some delays in the technical programme, the start to gathering data from GP surgeries has been postponed from 1st April 2014 to Autumn 2014. (continues) There is a great deal at stake. The gains in organising the NHS and in new treatments could be important. The programme has support from the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). Support has also come from a group of some 40 well-known medical charities. These charities include The British Heart Foundation, the Alzheimer's Society, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust. They see the benefits to treatment and to medical research of gathering this data. You can find out more about the Care.Data programme at www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/thenhs/records/healthrecords/Pages/care-data.aspx and about the NHS secure data centre at www.hscic.gov.uk . Sharing of data between your GP and others is covered by the Data Protection Act and by the NHS's own data protection principles known as the Caldicott principles. Under the Data Protection Act you can ask any organisation that holds identifiable data about you to show you your own records. This is not the only programme for sharing your data outside your GP's surgery. Unless you have opted out, a record called the Summary Care Record, detailing your current medications, allergies and bad reactions will be maintained at a national centre. This will be available to healthcare staff treating you, for example in an emergency, subject to your consent, provided that you are in a position to give it. You can find out more about NHS summary care records at www.nhscarerecords.nhs.uk. Hospital treatment records have been collected in this way for some decades, apparently without scandal or offence. The innovation is now to do the same for general practice and community nursing and to allow these data to be linked with the hospital treatment records. In addition, details of your medical history will also be shared on a need to know and case-by-case basis between your GP surgery and other healthcare and social care staff treating you, for example district nurses, hospital doctors, social workers and so on. All the healthcare and social care staff treating you are legally bound to protect your confidential data. The proposed Care.Data programme, now postponed until Autumn 2014, will required medical histories to be uploaded to a national centre for this data, the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). Here GP data can be linked with hospital data to allow the course of a medical condition to be thoroughly tracked. Data sets can be passed to researchers for specific projects or published. The constraints on keeping data confidential are strict and insist that it should be impossible to learn and new definite information about you from the published or supplied data. Where it is sufficient that the numbers of patients in different categories be passed on (aggregated data), that will be done, but even then there are strict limits on identifying small groups so that individual confidential information cannot be identified. The data held at the Care.Data centre (HSCIC) will be pseudonymised so that identifying details like name, NHS number, postcode, age will either be omitted or represented by broader categories so that no individual could be identified. The identifying details are replaced by a made-up identifier which can still be used to link together different records belonging to the same individual. The programme is currently examining whether that pseudonymising could be done at the GP surgery before exporting the data to the secure centre. You can find out more about pseudoynmised data at www.openpseudonymiser.org It is envisaged that other secure centres may be licensed to receive this data. It is not clear whether these will be public or private centres. They will have to follow the same strict rules as HSCIC. It is useful to realise that the HSCIC should not be organised like the Police National Computer or Vehicle Licensing Agency where thousands of staff have access to individual records, and corruption has, sadly, sometimes led to the loss of confidentiality in some cases. It should not be organised to provide identifiable individual records. An NHS England campaign has been mounted to deliver an explanatory leaflet to every household explaining the Care.Data programme, its potential benefits and how to opt out if so desired. This doesn't seem to have been very successful. The information provided on the full extent of the programme and the powers of HSCIC have not really got across to the public at large. The six-month postponement gives a chance for a clear case to be made for the programme, with clear boundaries delimited, so that greater public understanding and consent can be gained for the research and organisational benefits of this programme to be realised.

The NHS is to moderate its underpayment of hospitals for seeing patients in A&E, the Guardian website reports. A big headache for NHS hospitals has been that theyt have not been getting full fees for patients attending A&E. Instead they get only 30% of the fee for every patient more than seen in the year 2008/9. With steeply rising attendance this has put finances under strain. CCGs have been advised to spend the money withheld with providers. Locally some of the money withheld from the RBH has returned to it but by no means all the money withheld. It is now reported that Monitor, the organisation which is charged with supervising providers and setting the treatment tariffs, has decided that CCGs and providers will have to agree their own threshold for withholding part of the fee, and will have to show that money withheld is being spent on alternatives to A&E. Although CCGs are getting a little more money (in real terms) this year than last, some is being transferred to a pooled budget with Social Care, so this wil put local budgets under further strain. South Reading NHS CCG has indicated that it will work to keep more patients in their own homes rather than in hospital, where appropriate, with its projected "Hospital at Home" programme, of which we expect to hear more in the coming months.

We will be meeting between 6pm and 7:30pm on Wednesday, 27th November at the University Health Centre, 9, Northcourt Avenue, Reading RG2 7HE The main feature will be a presentation on South Reading's Health Needs as assessed in the annual Joint Strategic Health Assessment (JSNA) by the Reading Borough Public Health Team. The assessment forms the basis of local commissioning of hospital and community healthcare by the CCG for the next two-year and five-year periods. News from local practice Patient Groups will be welcome. All members welcome - to join please use the form on this web site.