453 research outputs found
Patient choice at the point of GP referral: Department of Health
1 The Department of Health has a Public Service
Agreement target to ensure that by the end of 2005 every
hospital appointment in the National Health Service in
England (the NHS) will be booked for the convenience of
the patient, making it easier for patients and their General
Practitioners (GPs) to choose the hospital and consultant
that best meets their need. The Department aims to
provide patients with the opportunity to choose between
four to five healthcare providers for elective hospital
treatment by December 2005. In consultation with their
GP, patients should be able to choose, from a menu of
NHS and independent sector healthcare providers, their
preferred location for treatment. Patients should also be
able to book the time and date of their initial outpatient
appointment within 24 hours of the decision to refer the
patient for treatment. This target will apply to around
9.4 million patients referred for hospital treatment by their
GP each year, around four per cent of the total estimated
241 million GP consultations.
2 Choice at referral can contribute to a more patientfocused health service, bringing benefits to both patients
and the NHS. But providing such a choice will not happen
by accident. There are a number of dependencies and
interactions with other policies that need to be managed.
Information Technology (IT) systems need to be developed
and modified and significant cultural, organisational and
behavioural changes will need to be made by patients,
NHS organisations and staff.
3 This report examines whether the Department is on
track to deliver choice at the point of referral successfully
by the target date of December 2005. Our work has
found that:
a Progress has been made towards delivering choice
at referral through establishing the required
organisational infrastructure, commissioning new
IT systems and modifications to existing ones, and
providing support for the NHS organisations that will
deliver it.
b The engagement of GPs is currently low and is a key
risk which the Department must address to deliver
choice successfully. The Department plans to
address this risk through a campaign to inform and
engage GPs during 2005 and it will need to monitor
carefully the progress of this campaign.
c Choice at referral will be delivered most efficiently
and effectively through electronic booking (e-booking,
also known as Choose and Book), in which the
Electronic Booking Service, commissioned by the
Department’s National Programme for IT (NPfIT),
is linked to upgraded or new computer systems in
hospitals and GPs’ surgeries. However, e-booking
will not be universally available by December 2005.
Until e-booking is fully adopted choice will have to be
provided in other, less efficient, ways.
d Parts of the NHS still have much to do if they
are to deliver choice. A significant minority of
Primary Care Trusts do not yet have adequate plans
in place to manage the introduction of choice and
some may struggle to manage the required new
commissioning arrangements.
4 Our more detailed findings are as follows.
Progress has been made towards
delivering choice at referral
5 The Department believes that choice is affordable.
Additional annual infrastructure and transaction costs
are estimated to be £122 million – or 1.4 per cent of the
current total expenditure on elective care. The main aim
of introducing choice is to improve services for patients,
but it should lead to increased efficiencies in primary and
secondary care services worth an estimated £71 million,
off-setting some of these costs.
6 It is essential that choice is supported by other
elements of system reform including e-booking, payment
by results, commissioning and appropriate capacity.
Modelling exercises have shown that the system reforms
should work in harmony with one another. Payment by
results should enable the transfer of funding to follow the
patient and there should be sufficient capacity across the
system to enable choice to be effective.
7 Much of the organisational infrastructure that
is required for choice is in place and there is clear
accountability for the delivery of the programme. To
strengthen detailed national programme management
arrangements the Department created, on 22 December
2004, a new post of National Implementation Director
for Choose and Book, with effect from 10 January 2005.
The new Director will be responsible for overseeing the
implementation of choice within the NHS whilst the
National Programme for IT Group Programme Director for
Choose and Book will continue to be responsible for Choose
and Book technology development and deployment, patient
access and Choose and Book contract management.
8 The Department has provided different types of
support to the NHS – for example, ten pilot schemes
have been run to test the policy in practice. It has set up a
system for periodically measuring progress and used this to
establish the position at the end of October 2004, creating
a baseline against which to monitor future progress.
9 Research has identified what information patients
will want to base their choices on, and the Department
is seeking to provide this. While it is unlikely that full
information will be available for December 2005, the
majority of those aspects identified by patients as being
the most important, such as waiting times and basic
access information, will be in place. The Department
plans to increase the information available over time.
The key risk to the delivery of choice
is the engagement of GPs
10 Choice cannot be delivered without support from
GPs but our survey of GPs found that around half of
GPs know very little about it and 61 per cent feel either
very negative or a little negative. GPs’ concerns include
practice capacity, workload, consultation length and fears
that existing health inequalities will be exacerbated. The
Department has deliberately held back its main effort to
inform and engage GPs about choice until it has had a
working e-booking system to show GPs, but it intends to
mount a campaign to inform and engage GPs during 2005.
Until e-booking is fully adopted
choice will be supported by
other mechanisms
11 The Department has commissioned Atos Origin to
develop a national system for e-booking, which will be
linked to upgraded or new Patient Administration Systems
in hospitals and IT systems in GPs’ surgeries to provide
an overall service known as e-booking. The National
Programme for IT has planned the roll out of e-booking on
an incremental basis to minimise risk, and to link it by the
end of 2005 to some 60 to 70 per cent of hospital systems
and GP practices.
12 E-booking is the most effective and efficient way
of delivering the Department’s plans for choice, and
alternative booking mechanisms offer poorer value for
money. Atos Origin has delivered a functioning system
and the first booking using e-booking was made in
July 2004. However the roll-out of e-booking has been
slower than planned and at the end of December 2004
only 63 bookings had been made. Problems have
included the reluctance of users to work with an
unreliable end-to-end system, limited progress in linking
to GP and hospital systems, and the limited number of
GPs willing to use the system.
13 The Department believes that new releases of
software have addressed the reliability of the whole
end-to-end system and that having a fully operational
system will encourage GPs to engage with e-booking. The
roll-out of changes to hospital systems to allow them to
link to e-booking is gathering pace and four types of GP
systems can now link to e-booking, although the largest
supplier has not yet agreed an implementation plan. A
combined team of Departmental and NHS personnel
are working with the three main existing GP system
suppliers to agree a national deployment schedule. This
work should be completed by February 2005, along with
a nationally negotiated commercial arrangement. The
Department is also developing and trialling contingency
plans against further delays, as well as alternatives to the
fully integrated Choose and Book solution.
Parts of the NHS still have much to do
14 Programme management arrangements in the NHS
are incomplete. While most Primary Care Trusts expect to
be able to deliver the choice target, there is variability in
their overall performance. As many as a quarter of Primary
Care Trusts currently forecast that they will not deliver the
choice targets. In addition, some Primary Care Trusts may
struggle to manage the new commissioning arrangements
and two-thirds have yet to commission the required number
of providers. The department is developing a framework of
support to assist trusts to overcome these obstacles.
15 The Department needs urgently to address the low
level of GP support for their plans for implementing
choice at referral, and should:
I Press on urgently with its plans for informing GPs
about the implementation of choice at referral and
its impact on GPs and patients.
II Monitor the views of GPs, for example by a regular
survey, repeating key questions from our own survey,
to assess the rate of progress being achieved towards
the level of support needed to meet its target of full
implementation by December 2005.
III Consider whether further action is needed to secure
the required level of GP support, once GPs are fully
informed on what choice at referral involves.
16 The Department should also:
IV Complete its planned benefits realisation plan for
choice at referral by the summer of 2005, along with
a monitoring mechanism and quantified targets.
V Keep under regular and close review the progress
of its planned implementation of choice through
implementing e-booking and consider the scope
for accelerating the roll-out of e-booking to make it
available everywhere by December 2005.
VI If it becomes clear that it is not possible to deliver
e-booking everywhere by December 2005, the
Department should:
a monitor closely the development of the interim
solutions to ensure that they meet their delivery
dates; and
b ensure that the implementation of interim
solutions does not detract from the priority of
bringing in fully integrated e-booking systems
as soon as possible.
VII Establish an evaluation framework for Primary
Care Trust commissioning to assist Strategic Health
Authorities in assessing the capacity and skills
of Primary Care Trusts in this area and securing
improvements in capacity and skills where necessary
Civil society organisations and Target 4.7 of the SDGs: towards intersectionality for promoting a more just and sustainable world
Target 4.7 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals can provide an opportunity for a more transformative approach to education. To consider this requires a new approach to learning that moves beyond subjects and disciplines to recognise intersectionality as being central to providing a radical rethinking of the purpose of education. Evidence from initiatives by civil society organisations in England shows that there are examples of these practices. At an international level, the Dublin Declaration on Global Education to 2050 provides an additional boost to calling for a major transformation in education
Galois theory and commutators
We prove that the relative commutator with respect to a subvariety of a
variety of Omega-groups introduced by the first author can be described in
terms of categorical Galois theory. This extends the known correspondence
between the Froehlich-Lue and the Janelidze-Kelly notions of central extension.
As an example outside the context of Omega-groups we study the reflection of
the category of loops to the category of groups where we obtain an
interpretation of the associator as a relative commutator.Comment: 14 page
Algebraic logoi
We introduce normal cores, as well as the more general action cores, in the
context of a semi-abelian category, and further generalise those to split
extension cores in the context of a homological category. We prove that, if the
category is moreover well-powered with (small) joins, then the existence of
split extension cores is equivalent to the condition that the change-of-base
functors in the fibration of points are geometric. We call a finitely complete
category that satisfies this condition an algebraic logos. We give examples of
such categories, compare them with algebraically coherent ones, and study
equivalent conditions as well as stability under common categorical operations.Comment: Revision with changes throughout the text; new final section; 22
page
Global citizens: Who are they?
A growing desire to instigate global citizenship programmes in Higher Education (HE) has led to the development of optional structured opportunities for students to engage in prosocial activities. One of the challenges facing such programmes is to demonstrate and plan for the personal growth of those students. This paper reports the dispositional, prosocial and attitudinal characteristics; knowledge and skills; and perceptions of social justice that students who undertake these activities bring to their initial participation. The findings indicate, that in comparison to a control group, the students differ significantly in a number of important ways (e.g. conscientiousness, extraversion, openness; Machiavellianism, prosocial behaviour; self-esteem; skills relating to social action and tolerance and understanding and their concern regarding social problems). However, consideration should be given to the ways in which those students can be developed within a framework for social justice. Further, recruitment procedures for citizenship programmes in general should encourage the participation of a more diverse group of students than currently appears to be the case
Recommended from our members
The effectiveness of protected areas in the conservation of species with changing geographical ranges
A cornerstone of conservation is the designation and management of protected areas (PAs): locations often under conservation management containing species of conservation concern, where some development and other detrimental influences are prevented or mitigated. However, the value of PAs for conserving biodiversity in the long term has been questioned given that species are changing their distributions in response to climatic change. There is a concern that PAs may become climatically unsuitable for those species that they were designated to protect, and may not be located appropriately to receive newly-colonizing species for which the climate is improving. In the present study, we analyze fine-scale distribution data from detailed resurveys of seven butterfly and 11 bird species in Great Britain aiming to examine any effect of PA designation in preventing extinctions and promoting colonizations. We found a positive effect of PA designation on species' persistence at trailing-edge warm range margins, although with a decreased magnitude at higher latitudes and altitudes. In addition, colonizations by range expanding species were more likely to occur on PAs even after altitude and latitude were taken into account. PAs will therefore remain an important strategy for conservation. The potential for PA management to mitigate the effects of climatic change for retracting species deserves further investigation
Can agricultural cultivation methods influence the healthfulness of crops for foods
The aim of the current study was to investigate if there are any health effects of long-term consumption of organically grown crops using a rat model. Crops were retrieved over two years from along-term field trial at three different locations in Denmark, using three different cultivation systems(OA, organic based on livestock manure; OB, organic based on green manure; and C, conventional with mineral fertilizers and pesticides)with two field replicates. The cultivation system had an impact on the nutritional quality, affecting γ-tocopherol, some amino acids, and fatty acid composition. Additionally, the nutritional quality was affected by harvest year and location. However, harvest year and location rather than cultivation system affected the measured health biomarkers. In conclusion, the differences in dietary treatments composed of ingredients from different cultivation systems did not lead to significant differences in the measured health biomarkers, except for a significant difference in plasma IgGl evels
Opinions of citizen scientists on open access to UK butterfly and moth occurrence data
Citizen science plays an increasingly important role in biodiversity research and conservation, enabling large volumes of data to be gathered across extensive spatial scales in a cost-effective manner. Open access increases the utility of such data, informing land-use decisions that may affect species persistence, enhancing transparency and encouraging proliferation of research applications. However, open access provision of recent, fine-scale spatial information on the locations of species may also prompt legitimate concerns among contributors regarding possible unintended negative conservation impacts, violations of privacy and commercial exploitation of volunteer-gathered data. Here we canvas the attitudes towards open access of contributors (104 regional co-ordinators and 510 recorders) of species occurrence records to two of the largest citizen science biodiversity recording schemes, the UK’s Butterflies for the New Millennium project and National Moth Recording Scheme. We find that while the majority of participants expressed support for open access in principle, most were more cautious in practice, preferring to limit the spatial resolution of records, particularly of threatened species, and restrict commercial reuse of data. In addition, citizen scientists’ opinions differed between UK countries, taxonomic groups and the level of involvement volunteers had in the schemes. In order to maintain successful and democratic citizen science schemes, organisers, funders and data users must understand and respect participants’ expectations and aspirations regarding open data while seeking to optimise data use for scientific and societal benefits
Assessing Butterflies in Europe. Executive summary
1. The Assessing Butterflies in Europe (ABLE) project was an EU Parliamentary Pilot project with a duration of two years (beginning of December 2019 to the end of November 2020) and received €800,000 of funding via a service contract with Directorate General Environment. 2. The mandate and rationale from the EU Parliament was: “The project aims at developing a suite of EU Lepidoptera indicators which can help improve conservation measure and assess progress in implementing EU policies and legislation such as the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 and the EU Habitats Directive. Besides providing a highly relevant indicator for measuring progress in terms of managing and restoring Natura 2000 sites, it would also contribute to monitoring progress on Target 3 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, which aims to increase the contribution of agriculture and forestry to maintaining and enhancing biodiversity. In particular, the pilot should deliver a representative indicator to help monitor the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on grassland biodiversity. It will also provide data to produce a climate change indicator, thereby contributing to the ongoing revision of climate change adaptation strategies. Indicators will also be possible for woodland, wetland and urban habitats.” 3. The ABLE project was delivered by a consortium of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Butterfly Conservation Europe, Butterfly Conservation UK, De Vlinderstichting and HelmholtzZentrum für Umweltforschung GmbH – UFZ. Considerable in-kind contributions were provided by Butterfly Conservation partners across Europe. 4. There is mounting evidence of widespread declines in the diversity and abundance of insects across the globe. The ABLE project is particularly timely in helping to develop capacity for monitoring of insects and assessing the status of butterflies in the EU. 5. There are 482 butterfly species in Europe (451 occurring within the EU27), breeding in a wide range of habitats. Butterflies react quickly to change and are considered to be good biological indicators, especially of other insects and pollinators. Monitoring butterflies can help shed light on changes in these important groups. 6. The main aims of the ABLE project were to collate butterfly monitoring data across Europe, to facilitate the start of new schemes in the EU, and to develop indicators to help policy design and evaluation. 7. Following the mandate from the EU Parliament for this Pilot project, we make the following key recommendations: i. Use Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (eBMS) data and indicators for EU policy design; to inform resource planning, especially for Member State’s Prioritised Action Frameworks (PAFs); and to track, evaluate and adjust EU and MSs policy implementation, including the EU Green Deal, EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 and the EU Farm to Fork Strategy, to help reverse pollinator declines. ii. Use Member State and Article 17 data on butterflies to inform the design, implementation and evaluation of the EU CAP and MS’s CAP Strategic Plans; to ensure Forestry plans include more grassland refuges and herb rich rides and edges; and that urban planning and regional developments invest in pollinator habitats. Butterfly Conservation Europe 2020 \textbar ASSESSING BUTTERFLIES IN EUROPE – EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 6 iii. Use available Butterfly Monitoring Scheme data to strengthen the quality of assessments of conservation Status of Habitats Directive listed habitats and species in meeting mandatory reporting requirements under Art 17 of the Directive iv. Invest in linking butterfly data with land use and management data, including implementation of Natura 2000 Management Plans, Land Parcel Information system and Satellite data to help evaluate conservation effectiveness v. Support additional monitoring of rare and vulnerable butterflies (including endemics and those not listed on the Habitats Directive) and designate some additional Protected Areas to sustain and enhance the quality of remaining areas that are important for these Red Listed butterflies and so prevent further extinctions vi. Invest in further capacity building and cooperation among citizen scientists, professionals, farmers and authorities to monitor and record abundance of butterflies, moths and other pollinators, including supporting coordination, training and growth of citizen science eBMS schemes (as recommended by EU Pollinator Expert Group); filling data gaps and developing tools and expertise to gather and integrate data from various sources. vii. ABLE shows that Citizen Science eBMS are cost effective, delivering very good value for money. New citizen science Butterfly Monitoring Schemes are needed in Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia. Together with further support to sustain and increase transects across most EU MSs, especially in the ten schemes newly created during the ABLE project. The ten EU27 countries where new Citizen Science butterfly monitoring schemes were begun in 2019/2020, with the support of ABLE, BCE partners and active volunteers, are Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland and Portugal. Together with Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxemburg, Lithuania (currently dormant), Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, there are now 22 EU(27) Member States with butterfly monitoring schemes. With several more outside the EU, including Norway, Switzerland and the UK (which has the longest running scheme). 8. This Executive Summary accompanies detailed technical reports on the three project tasks: development of butterfly indicators, development of butterfly monitoring networks, and tools to support butterfly monitoring and analysis
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