eGPlearning
Find out the latest news in General practice, including charges, contracts, access and so much more.
00:00 GP update intro
01:17 Rishi or Liz for the NHS?
12:10 £10 charge in General Practice?
18:30 Adastra cyber hack
26:20 Babylon contract handback
36:20 GP contract handback
New PM
Recession, inflation, high energy prices… pressure on everyone and in particular struggling patients and practices
INTRODUCTION
Tory leadership candidates and health?
Little focus on health and social care, or at least coverage
Take a look
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60037657
Sunak
choosing to make it more of a focus
NHS is my top priority
Tackling NHS back logs is a national emergency
back log task force
Eliminate over 1yr waits
Father a GP mother a pharmacist
£10 fine for people who repeatedly miss GP & hospital appointments
Is this practical, will it help?
Liz truss
Reduce pay for public sector workers outside London
Cut NHS manager
Thoughts…
Interesting lack of attention and lack of traction for these issues in the media
Main focus on economic policy – maybe this is a good thing – political input to health isn’t always positive
Hoping for continuity and improvement rather than another shake up
And appropriate investment and addressing underlying issue… workforce, estates, infrastructure, honesty about access etc…
Adastra Cyber Attack
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2022/08/advanced-major-outage-cyber-attack/
https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/breaking-news/gps-sharing-patient-records-in-word-docs-as-cyber-attack-resolution-days-away/
On August 4, the business software and services provider experienced issues with a number of health and care products, including its Adastra software which works with 85% of NHS 111 services.
First highlighted by Pulse, parts of the NHS 111 service suffered a ‘total system outage’ last Thursday morning, following a ransomware attack.
It said: ‘We have agreed that clinical consultation information will be sent in the form of a Microsoft Word document via secure email to your practice nhs.net email account.
Communication in Liverpool seen by pulse:
‘This will allow practices to review key patient information and choose how to record that information in practice systems.’
It added: ‘Whilst this is not ideal, it is considered a lower risk to patient care than practices being unsighted on out-of-hours interactions.’
Thoughts?
Just how reliant we are on tech – security of the infrastructure is vital
Lots of potential bad actors in the future? This attack financially motivated
Lessons learned from previous cyber attacks? – we did see significant improvements
Format of Adastra reports is “old fashioned” – would word be an improvement?
OfficeN365 – backup and redundancy
Babylon hands back NHS contracts?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/09/babylon-health-nhs-contracts-ended/
Pulling out of multi-year contracts with NHS trusts
University Birmingham contract: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/23/birmingham-to-begin-accident-and-emergency-online-chat-service-in-tech-revolution-for-nhs-care
including one from the start of 2020 that had been trumpeted as a 10-year partnership with the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT).
Babylon 360 https://www.babylonhealth.com/en-us/services/babylon-360
Another contract, with University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) NHS Foundation Trust that dates back to 2019, is also being ended — in that case at the request of the Trust itself — with the service slated to terminate in October.
AI chat bot / symptom checker…..
GP at hand remains – 115,000 patient in and around london
Not looking to expand in their uk NHS operations
Challenging funding environment within NHS and it’s contracts….
Last month Babylon announced it planned to cut costs by $100 million in Q3 — by reducing what a spokeswoman referred to as “non-core activities” — targeting multimillion dollar losses ($402.5 million in 2021) that have outstripped its annual revenue ($323 million in 2021), although the latter metric was up 4x last year.
Thoughts
Risks of working with private sector – they can pull out if not working out for them
Interesting that they cannot
Highlights need to be profitable and that they are drawn to profitable activities
AI not delivering… yet?… another AI winter… dealing directly with the public in particular is complex
TR article
Practice hands back contract due to changes in temporary registrations and stopping funding by local ICB for another provider instead.
https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/practice-personal-finance/gp-practice-forced-to-hand-back-contract-after-icb-pulls-70k-in-funding/
Things to look out for… Coming up….
S1 FBUG 22 and GP5T4
S1 FBUG 22 open now https://bit.ly/S1FBUG22
TPP, Ardens, PCIT and more limited early bird tickets
Tue 11th October 22
GP5T4 lots of unique content for GP trainers.
Sat 19th Nov 22
