September 2003

What the Newspapers said (Mainly the Evening Post) in September 2003

Plans for a purpose-built conference centre in Bristol have been abandoned. There is to be a 10,000 seat arena at Temple Meads where conference-style events could be held. In addition the Colston Hall will provide a 2000 seat venue that could be used for conferences.

Doctors in and around Bristol are becoming increasingly disillusioned with their involvement in the new local Primary Care Trusts. Some doctors are pulling out of the Trusts because they are becoming frustrated. Dr Neil Crichton (Chairmen of the Bristol and West PCTs Professional Executive Committee) said that many doctors were unhappy about the management side of the role and would prefer to spend more time with their patients instead.

People in Bristol who suffer from asthma are being encouraged to help themselves to control their condition by following the advice given in a new information booklet – "Take control of your asthma". The booklet contains information supplied by the National Asthma Campaign.

The Evening Post has launched a cancer campaign. Its aims are to raise awareness about the symptoms of cancer and to improve diagnosis, to highlight how people can reduce their risk of developing the illness, and to raise an initial £25,000 to improve cancer care services in the City. The Evening Post of September 24th contained a personal message of support from the Prime Minister. The paper listed 21 specific projects that it hopes to fund.

The British Lung Foundation’s Little Lungs are for Life scheme was launched at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital recently. The scheme aims to inform parents and parents to be that commonsense steps can contribute to a life-long healthy respiratory system for their child. Dr Leaf, Consultant Neonatologist, said that premature babies are born with immature lungs and may continue to have breathing difficulties for many months.

A new charity concerned with stroke has been launched in Weston-super-Mare – the Weston Active Stroke Association.

The Evening Post has featured articles and letters about the closure of the ITO factory in Bedminster which employed people with learning difficulties. The factory is said to have closed mainly because the Bristol City Council removed a Grant to the charity of £32,000. (Donal Early, a well-known psychiatrist in Bristol, was involved with starting this organisation about 40 years ago. At the time it was regarded as being a pioneering initiative and it has remained an important resource for people with learning difficulties in the City. Ed.)

The new organisations preparing to take over from Community Health Councils are looking to recruit volunteers from the Bristol area. The Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health needs people to represent the region. PPI Forums are being set-up by the Commission and will have powers to make checks on the standard of health services. (A coming issue of the Med-Chi website will cover public involvement in the operations of the NHS.Ed.)

The North Bristol NHS Trust service for helping patients concerns and providing information and advice is set to expand by taking on special link workers and trained volunteers. The Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) recently held a training day for 12 volunteers. Frenchay Hospital was one of the pioneering hospitals of patient representative services 10 years ago. The modern PALS version of the service also provides a pathway for people to get involved in shaping the Trusts services

The biggest ever Government IT outsourcing project was thrown into disarray when Lockheed Martin pulled out of the race to supply up to £10 billion worth of computer systems to the NHS. Doug Naysmith, Bristol North West MP is promoting a Bill in Parliament to help people with dementia. The Bill would give carers more say in what happens to the people they love when they are not able to decide for themselves. They will let people choose in advance who will be consulted about their care.

September is the Silver Jubilee anniversary of the Alcoholic Dependency Centre at the Robert Smith Unit in Clifton. Over the last 25 years more than 7,500 clients have used this service – many of them more than once. Staffed by a team of doctors, therapists, nurses and others who run a group-based treatment programme.

Bristol Primary Care Trusts are providing appropriate child care facilities for doctors and staff despite failures elsewhere in the country. A survey of England’s 94 local medical committees found that 106 PCTs had not yet met the childcare needs of their staff.

A new expanded service for children with life-threatening illnesses has been launched at a Kingswood nursery. A £950,000 lottery grant, spread over 3 years, has been secured to pay for extra help in the home for children and their families with life-threatening illnesses. The money will go to providing specialist support and to providing respite care.

An Ombudsman Report into the funding of long-term nursing care has forced the Health Trusts in the former Avon area plus Gloucester and Wiltshire, to admit that they used the wrong criteria for judging entitlement to free services between 1996 and 2000. Avon carried on using the illegal rules until February of this year. The Health Trusts in Bristol could be forced to repay thousands of pounds to pensioners who were wrongly told that they should pay for nursing care.

A Bristol company say that it has invented a new sprayable chemical that can kill MRSA and TB. The agent is said to have virtually no toxicity. The official figures in March 2003 show that all main hospitals in Bristol have been hit by MRSA. The rate varied between 0.29 and 0.32 cases per thousand bed days.

John Reed, Health Secretary, has promised that there will be no repeat of the massive debts that have left hospitals in Bristol millions of pounds in the red. Mr Reed said that he was confident that new managers in place would turn deficit around.

More than 100 hospitals in England are to be forced to cut millions of pounds from their budgets as part of a major reorganisation of NHS funding. Under Government plans, "inefficient" hospitals are to lose up to 9% of their income and will have to cover the shortfall by making savings. The United Bristol Health Care Trust stands to lose about £25 million, Leeds Teaching Hospitals £59 million and Birmingham University Hospitals £11 million pounds.

North Bristol NHS Trust has been awarded a £28 million one-off payment to help clear its projected £40 million deficit for this year. The Strategic Health Authority has given the Trust £14 million from the NHS bank and the local Primary Care Trusts have matched that amount out of the local health community budget. Southmead and Frenchay Hospitals are now predicting an £8.7 million end of year overdraft.

More than £200 million will be pumped into revamping health facilities in the region over the next 3 years according to figures released by the Government. In this financial year £66 million has been set aside by the Strategic Health Authority for spending on capital projects – including building maintenance, refurbishment, and new facilities. By 2005/6 this sum will have risen to £84 million.

North Bristol NHS Trust is soon to start a new round of consultations over the future of Southmead and Frenchay Hospitals. The first stage of the consultation will begin in the late autumn and run into the spring and will be designed to ascertain people’s ideas on how services can be shaken-up. The second phase will run until the summer and will present the public with a series of detailed options. These include moving all services to Southmead or Frenchay, moving most services to one site but keeping minor services going at the other site or opening a brand new hospital on a green fields site. Other choices would include maintaining both sites although this would be a costly option. Although the Trust has been given a one-off payment of £28 million further savings of £12.5 million are needed. Sonia Mills, Chief Executive, said that the condition of the buildings was a major issue. She also sited lack of progress in the reconfiguration of services across Bristol.

There have been several articles in the Evening Post about the closure of some beds at Keynsham Hospital. BANES is trying to save £550 thousand from its budget and for this reason launched a restructuring programme. The Chairman of the Executive Committee said that there would be the opportunity to transfer other services from the RUH into the space released: for example – a specialist rehabilitation service, a stroke service, minor surgery, enhanced out-patient facilities and more out-patient clinics.

Dawn Primarolo, MP, has collected more than 3000 names in support of a petition to build a community hospital in South Bristol.

A new garden for cancer patients has been opened on the roof of the Bristol Oncology Centre. The garden is a space for people who want to have some fresh air and space

A Bristol doctor has said that the return of the matron has led to major improvements in junior doctors working lives at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

There has been a large influx of foreign nurses to Bristol Hospitals. This is said to be helping to halt the city’s recruitment crisis. However both the acute Trusts are continuing to spend large sums of money on agency nurses.

Staff at the Bristol Royal Infirmary have welcomed the employment of Jonathan Asbridge to the role of Patient Champion for the A&E Department. The appointment of the new Champion follows the recent results of patient surveys published by CHI which showed that many people were still experiencing long waits and poor conditions in A&E units. Mr Asbridge is currently Chief Nurse at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and The London NHS Trust.

The Friends of Frenchay Hospital have raised more than one million pounds to buy equipment for the hospital including a digital angiography unit costing £700,000. The state of the art scanner is able to detect vascular problems in patients including targeting tiny blood vessels in the head

Plans for the construction of the MS Nerve Centre are going ahead. A planning application has been submitted. It is hoped to complete building work within the next 2 years. (The precise functions of this centre are at the moment unclear. We hope to cover this matter in a later issue of the site.Ed.)

The first analysis of the effects of setting up a dedicated Emergency Nurse Practitioner (ENP) service at the Bristol Royal Infirmary has shown that each day the team sees up to a 5th of those attending the A&E Department. The ENP service concentrates on managing injuries, leaving medical staff to focus on the critically ill. Its introduction has resulted in a faster, more efficient, service for these patients. All patients "managed" by the ENP during the first 5 months of this year were seen and treated within 4 hours. From December 2002 when the ENP service started to April 2003 ENP practitioners treated more than 1000 patients.

Bristol University has been placed 7th out of 125 university and higher education institutions in England. It is the highest ranking university in the South West. The league table is based on a number of criteria which include teaching and research quality. Bristol University had 38,502 applications in 2003 – for about 3000 places.

The Medical Research Council has awarded a grant of £4.7 million to the Centre for Synaptic Plasticity in Bristol. This will ensure that the Centre’s research continues for a further 5 years. The Grant includes awards to individual scientists. The group is headed by Professor Graham Collingridge.

The Evening Post published a major article on the Bristol-based Children of the 90s project.This project was started, and is run, by Professor Jean Golding at Bristol University.She published the aims of the study in 1989. A total of 14,500 new-born babies were recruited for the study.The children have been carefully followed and checked at intervals.Now, 12 years on, the project is expected to cost one million pounds a year.Jean Golding said – "The aims of the whole study were to try and sort out what the problems are in terms of health and well-being of children with the long-term aim of finding a way to help and provide advice".Professor Golding said that one of the most exciting things will be to see how children get through the difficult teenage years and which children end-up highly successful in whatever they are doing.Running the study has not been easy and about 2000 of the original 4,500 have already dropped out.

(Bristol should be really proud of this pioneering study.Ed.)