Prime minister Boris Johnson finally admitted that the Covid-19 testing programme ‘has huge problems’ after further accusations of a system in chaos and reports of a significant backlog of unprocessed tests at laboratories.
B. Braun Strategic Partnerships aim to support the healthcare sector in returning to a new normal through creating innovative pathways focusing on reducing system costs, improving efficiency and patient outcomes.
Cost and financial improvement programmes (FIPs) are generally managed through spreadsheets, requiring resources for processing data. This leads to silo-working, lack of transparency and credibility, as well as timeliness issues with reporting. Lead your organisation towards digital transformation of your FIPs and scale up to collaborate with your sustainability and transformation partnership (STP) and integrated care system (ICS).
The biennial finance staff census provides a view of how the finance function looks right now – underlining areas such as diversity where improvements are needed – and a baseline against which to measure future changes.
NHS England and NHS Improvement have given further details of the financial arrangements for the rest of 2020/21, including how system-level funding envelopes have been calculated.
The NHS has welcomed the announcement of the system financial envelopes for the remainder of the financial year, but there are concerns about the levels of funding, a potential second wave of Covid-19 and the ability to hit service restoration targets.
The Department of Health and Social Care has announced funding and additional measures to help emergency departments and care providers over the winter months.
Things have changed fast during the Covid-19 pandemic. The adoption of digital technologies to support virtual appointments is the obvious example (see Diagnosis for the future, this issue). But the thinking around payment systems has also accelerated – with the end of episodic payment now likely to come far sooner than it might have done if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
Covid-19 has affected NHS frontline services and its support functions. For finance staff, the immediate impact was on the preparation of their annual accounts, with the countrywide lockdown announced just over a week before year-end. Professionally, it was a difficult time for staff, as outlined in a new HFMA survey.
Healthcare Finance editor Steve Brown says finance staff have risen to the Covid challenge, but face a busy agenda
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