Doctors are calling for a set of guidelines to ensure that patients are not moved out of hospital beds into a form of Continuing NHS Care (CNC), which fails to meet their medical needs. The BMA sets out the demand in a report which urges the Department of Health to emphasise the needs of the patient.The BMA says patients who could benefit from continuing care are those who do not need to stay in an acute hospital but need nursing, paramedical and medical care that prevents them from being formally discharged.

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NHS Direct, the round-the-clock health advice service, is set to grow in a three-year programme which will enable it to handle 16 million calls a year by 2006. This will more than double the service’s call-handling capacity and will be backed by an 80 per cent funding increase to 182 million pounds.Announcing the plans the health minister, John Hutton, highlighted the success of the nurse-led service which already deals with half a million calls a month. With its web-based partner NHS Direct Online it is already the largest e-healthcare provider in the world.

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This briefing, commissioned from Catalyst by the Transport and General Workers Union, sets out the key issues of concern in the debate over Foundation Hospitals, warning that they could inject a competitive ethos into the NHS and open a gap in service delivery between a small elite of favoured hospitals guarding their position against a lower tier of “second class” provision upon which the majority will depend. Foundation hospitals represent a full-blown assault on public services and a giant step towards privatisation.Link: http://www.catalystforum.org.uk/pubs/paper14.html

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