Health and care sector latest developments

Systemic racism affects maternity care for black women in England, says parliamentary committee

A report by the Health and Social Care Select Committee has found that black women in England are still facing poorer outcomes in their maternity care due to systemic racism, alongside failures in leadership and data collection. 

Across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts, while babies born to black mothers are at an increased risk of stillbirth. 

The committee also found that given these disparities, it was ‘indefensible’ that cultural competency training was not mandatory for NHS staff working across maternity services. 

They urged the government, the Royal College of Midwives and the Nursing and Midwifery Council to make the training compulsory for all staff, and that the training should be informed directly by the experience of black women. 

Acting chair of the committee Paulette Hamilton said that “safe maternal care for black women depends on a workforce that listens to, understands and respects their needs”, and she added that the government’s upcoming investigation into NHS maternity care must be a “turning point” for black women in particular. 

First group of Gazan children arrive for specialist NHS treatment 

Severely ill children from Gaza requiring urgent medical treatment recently arrived safely in the UK with their immediate families, the government has announced.

As part of the Gaza medical evacuation operation, these young patients are now receiving urgent medical at NHS hospitals, while their immediate family members are receiving support during their stay. 

More patients and their immediate families are expected in the coming weeks. 

Trust seeks £150 million partner to boost private income 

University Hospitals Dorset Foundation Trust has advertised a tender for a joint venture partner to support and grow its private patient services through a ten-year contract worth up to £150 million. 

The trust has recently benefitted from £550 million of capital funding to build a new hospital in Bournemouth and reorganise its services to make Poole Hospital the largest dedicated planned care site in the country. 

Documents included in the tender notice state that the trust’s capital charges are ‘significant’ and that ‘part of the payback is to expand profitable private work’. 

The move would signal a significant increase in the amount of private work undertaken by the trust. At the moment, it estimates that its current private patient services, which include a dedicated unit at Royal Bournemouth Hospital, have a turnover of £3.1 million a year. 

According to the tender notice, the joint venture partner would be expected to support the trust to ‘generate further income’ and would work under a ‘transparent profit share model’. 

Charity commits £10 million to build ‘neighbourhood’ care with trusts 

Macmillan Cancer Support has partnered with West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals Trust (WHHT) and non-profit enterprise Social Finance to create what it described as a first-of-its-kind model for neighbourhood health. Macmillan will invest £10 million in the scheme that aims to shift care from hospitals into the community. 

The programme will focus on supporting older people with multiple health conditions, including cancer, in south and west Hertfordshire. Around 500 patients will be supported in year one in the Hertfordshire district of Dacorum, 500 more in a different area the following year, and then 1,000 in year three – with the aim of reaching 2,000 patients across four neighbourhoods. 

The initiative, launching in November, has three core elements. The first is a multi-disciplinary team in the community focusing on preventative care delivered by WHHT’s partner, Central London Community Healthcare Trust; the second a community interest company (CIC) enabling the benefits of reduced hospital spending to be reinvested directly back into neighbourhood teams; and the third a grant-giving enterprise for grassroots organisations to provide additional voluntary support for patients. 

Of the £10million, which is a non-repayable grant, roughly £7 million will be spent on the preventative care component; £1million on the CIC, and £2 million on the grassroots support. The deal is spread over five years. 

New AI tool can predict a person’s risk of more than 1,000 diseases, according to experts 

Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can predict your personal risk of more than 1,000 diseases and forecast changes in health a decade in advance. 

The generative AI tool was custom-built by experts from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the German Cancer Research Centre and the University of Copenhagen, using algorithmic concepts similar to those used in large language models (LLMs).

It has been hailed as one of the most comprehensive demonstrations to date of how generative AI can model human disease progression at scale.