Health landscape report: 14 April -18 April

This report is a flexible summary, with the aim of sharing and highlighting a wide range of data and policy information relating to London general practice published in a given week. Where we view information to be of significant interest it is reproduced directly below the links to make the key points quicker to digest.  

Please feel free to share any useful stats/links you think we could include in future reports.  

Official bodies    

NHS Digital 

• All recent data releases can be seen here. 
• Guidance: Digital vision for antimicrobial stewardship in England [14/4]. 
• Guidance: Newborn and infant physical examination: programme handbook [15/4]. 
• Policy: Sub-contract for the provision of services related to the Network Contract DES 2025/26 [16/4]. 
• Regulatory: NHS provider directory and registers of licensed healthcare providers [16/4]. 
• Guidance: NHS England fit and proper person test framework for board members [16/4]. 

Department of Health and Social Care 

• Guidance: Kingdon review of children’s hearing services: terms of reference [14/4]. 
• Guidance: Public health commissioning in the NHS: 2025 to 2026 [14/4]. 
  • Information about NHS England’s objectives and funding arrangements as it commissions public health services. 
• Press release:Patients get care closer to home as GP scheme expanded [17/4]. 

UK Health Security Agency 

• Guidance: Measles: public health response to cases who have travelled whilst infectious [16/4]. 

Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency 

• Guidance: Medicines that you cannot export from the UK or hoard [15/4]. 
• Guidance: Risk minimisation measures for medicines [16/4]. 

BMA 

• Press release: BMA reacts to ‘disappointing’ High Court ruling on blurred lines between PAs and doctors [17/4]. 

Policy, think tanks, charities and representative bodies  

The Health Foundation 

• A healthier workplace needs more than good intentions – it needs good evidence [17/4]. 
• Nida Broughton, Interim Managing Director, BIT UK, and Commissioner, Commission for Healthier Working Lives, discusses the importance of evidence on what works for employers to provide healthier workplaces. 
• A new performance assessment framework for the NHS [16/4].  
• This blog discusses a new framework for assessing NHS performance.  
  • Overall score: NHS providers and Integrated Care Boards will get a score based on various metrics. 
  • Segmentation: Organisations will be grouped into five segments based on their scores, affecting the support they receive. 
  • Financial impact: Organisations in deficit will have their scores limited. 
  • Concerns: Some leaders worry that focusing only on performance might harm integration efforts. 
• AI and health care: we should focus on trustworthiness, not on trust [15/4]. 
• This blog highlights that in healthcare, we should focus on making AI systems trustworthy. It highlights problems with some AI models, like Epic’s Sepsis Model, which missed many real cases. The article stresses the need for public engagement, transparency, and standardising AI evaluations. It also calls for independent assessments and ongoing monitoring to ensure AI systems are reliable and safe. 
• Are ‘crack teams’ reducing NHS waiting lists? [14/4].  
• This blog discusses special teams of top doctors sent to 20 hospitals in England to reduce NHS waiting lists. These hospitals, called “Further Faster 20” (FF20) trusts, saw their waiting lists drop much faster than other hospitals. However, this was mainly because of fewer new referrals and more unreported removals, not because they treated more patients. The differences in waiting list reductions might be due to natural variation or chance. More data and time are needed to see if this approach really works. 

Smart Thinking 

Think tank: Green Alliance 

• A better life [17/4].  
• The UK faces a convergence of serious challenges: rising poverty, sluggish economic growth and mounting geopolitical instability, all compounded by the escalating impacts of climate change. This publication highlights how these crises are deeply interconnected, and rather than viewing economic and environmental issues as competing priorities, we show that a transition to a green economy is the path to improving living standards, national security and our natural environment. 

The King’s Fund 

• Navigating the politics of health care reform [17/4].  
• This blog discusses the challenges of NHS reforms, noting that past efforts faced political difficulties. Successful reforms need a strong political strategy, alignment of government bodies, clinician support, compensation for those affected, and careful timing.  
• What’s the role of school nurses in supporting the ‘healthiest generation of children’? [16/4].  
• This blog highlights the crucial role of school nurses in children’s health. Their numbers have dropped by 33% since 2009 due to budget cuts, leading to uneven support. School nurses now focus more on safeguarding and complex needs, with less time for preventive care. The blog calls for addressing these issues to ensure the healthiest generation of children. 

General Medical Council 

• GMC welcomes judgment following judicial review by British Medical Association [17/4]. 
• The GMC welcomes the decision of the High Court, in a judgment handed down, to dismiss on all three grounds a judicial review claim brought by the BMA.  

London Trusts    

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust 

• Article: They have installed a new, state-of-the-art MRI scanner at Charing Cross Hospital, which will improve their diagnostic capability and ultimately help reduce waiting times [17/4]. 

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust 

• Article: The neurosurgical team at King’s College Hospital is trialling a new way of working to reduce the time patients are waiting for routine surgery [16/4].