Department of Health

Primary care minister David Mowat and Nicola Blackwood, parliamentary under-secretary of State for Public Health and Innovation, both lost seats, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively. Mowat had previously tabled the idea of merging GP practices in England into 1,500 superhubs.

The National Health Action Party challenged Health Minister Jeremy Hunt, taking 20% of his constituency vote, despite a comfortable 56% majority for Mr Hunt.

Nine doctors were elected, six Conservative, two Labour, and one representing the Scottish Nationalist Party.

NHS Halton Clinical Commissioning Group, responsible for planning NHS services for more than 125,000 people, has commited the organisation to commissioning cultural activity, using a "more than medicine" approach to support wellbeing. The CCG hopes to provide a mixed method model that others could follow.

Read more

If you work with older people or are interested in how the arts can maintain good health in later life, come along to our partnership event with RADA on Thursday 15 June at which we’ll be hosting an informative panel discussion on arts and ageing. This is an opportunity for you to bring your knowledge up to speed about recent successful projects using the arts to improve health and wellbeing in later life.

After a second sold-out Connect event last year, we’re pleased to announce that we will be holding another networking opportunity in partnership with Paintings in Hospitals.

NHS England has announced announcing that sugary drinks will be banned in hospital shops from next year unless suppliers voluntarily take action to cut sales over the next 12 months in an attempt to address rising incidence of diabetes, obesity and tooth decay.

WH Smith, Marks & Spencer, Greggs, the SUBWAY(r) brand, Medirest, ISS and the Royal Voluntary Service are the leading suppliers who have pledged to cut sales to 10% or less of their current levels.

The CQC has put four Trusts into special measures in its latest round of inspections; whilst the NHS has again failed to hit key targets on A&E and cancer waiting times - targets which were last achieved in July 2015.

The latest targets report concludes that the long-term trend in the NHS is one of greater volumes of both urgent and emergency care and elective activity, with ambulance calls receiving a face-to-face response up 6.4%, A&E attendances up 3.1%, emergency admissions up 2.9%, diagnostic tests up 4.7% and consultant-led treatment up 4.4%.

The Assembly's Regeneration Committee’s report, “Creative tensions: Optimising the benefits of culture through regeneration”, responds to the impact of gentrification on the arts and culture, making a number of recommendations to the London Mayor, from collecting better data on artists' workspaces to protection measures for grassroots venues. The committee chair,  Navin Shah, says in his introduction to the report that "Regeneration should be much more than economic development and physical improvements to infrastructure and the public realm".

The King's Fund have published a new report, "Understanding NHS Financial Pressures", the findings of which "set out create a fundamental challenge to the direction of travel set out in the NHS five year forward view". The report (attached) focuses primarily on four areas: genito-urinary medicine, district nursing, elective hip replacement, and neonatal services, and suggests that "Many of the cuts that have been made – such as cuts to staff and preventive services – are storing up problems for the future".

The People and Communities Board has published a series of "high impact actions" it hopes will accelerate the adoption of person- and community-centred approaches to health and care. The Board's report to the Chief Executive of NHS England, "A new relationship with people and communities", sets out six key actions that will help deliver Chapter Two of the Five Year Forward View, which set out the vision of a health and care system which fully engages people in their health, care and wellbeing.

NHS Improvement figures, leaked to the BBC, suggest government targets were missed by a significant percentage, with record numbers of people waiting over 12 hours for a hospital bed in Accident and Emergency.

The figures come from a document compiled by NHS Improvement, and show that there were more than 1.4 million attendances at A&E during January.

Read more