The first issue of the Bulletin carries the first analysis of patient safety data in England and Wales. It offers a unique overview of what is going wrong and describes the role of the Patient Safety Observatory in supporting improvements in patient safety at a national level. It includes analysis of more than 85,000 reports made by healthcare staff to the National Reporting and Learning System. The System provides a new way of providing feedback to the NHS. This database collects information on patient safety incidents from all 607 NHS organisations. It is the first comprehensive national reporting system for patient safety incidents in the world, and is the only reporting system covering all healthcare settings, i.e. primary care, acute care, learning disabilities, mental health and ambulance care.The Bulletin is available at: http://www.npsa.nhs.uk/site/media/documents/1246_PSO_Report_FINAL.pdf
A new initiative is offering customised training and development for local councillors. The Local Leadership Academy has been developed by the IDeA for non-executive members of local authorities and is based on the recognition that each council is unique.The Academy, known as LoLa, will offer customised development activities designed to build the capacity of non-executive councillors. Key features will include fitness checks of overview and scrutiny and community leadership. It will have development modules focused on a wide range of topical themes and issues.
More than one in five of schools that advertised for a new head teacher last year failed to make an appointment, according to research carried out for the National Association of Head Teachers and the Secondary Heads Association by Professor John Howson, of Education Data Surveys, and published today.The study shows that recruitment problems at senior levels worsened this year for all schools with 28 per cent of primary, 20 per cent of secondary, and 22 per cent of special school head teacher posts reportedly remaining unfilled in spite of being advertised. The two bodies representing head teachers are worried that these statistics, coupled with the high numbers of retirements from an ageing profession, mean the future looks grim unless there is action over both pay and heads’ workloads to attract more teachers into leadership.