In their main budget meeting on 6th April, open to observers from the public including BPV, Brent CCG Governing Body nodded through the 2016/17 draft budget of £430.4 million (3.05% increase on 2015/16) with a projected underlying surplus of £3.1 million without any challenge or vigorous questions at the meeting about how the budget pie should be divided up between clinical needs. The budget was…
BPV representatives attended the Brent CCG Governing Body budget pre-meeting question time for the public on 6th April 2016. We are allowed to submit questions relating to agenda items 48 hours before the meeting. There are usually about 2 to 3 working days to study the papers before we put questions in. This task is not everyone’s idea of fun, but we think someone should…
Brent Patient Voice has been closely monitoring the introduction of the new NHS Brent Community Cardiology Service commissioned by Brent Clinical Commissioning Group and provided by the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust at Willesden and Wembley Centres for Health and Care. This is an up-date on our 3 earlier reports. In September 2015 Brent CCG invited BPV Steering Group member Peter Latham to be…
On Tuesday 19th April Brent Patient Voice will be holding its second public meeting and first AGM. We are delighted that Brent MIND has agreed to co-sponsor this event with us. The topic will be “Race and Mental Health: are black communities getting a fair deal?” The speaker will be Dr Aggrey Burke, formerly Senior Lecturer and Consultant Psychiatrist at St George’s Hospital, London. There…
At the Brent Health and Wellbeing Board (H&WB) on 22 March BPV’s application for co-option was rejected. No-one spoke up in our favour and the Leader of the Council said that if we joined it would undermine the role of Healthwatch. Currently the H&WB is made up of members of Brent Council, Brent CCG and Healthwatch. These are statutory members and Healthwatch is a body…
The online news blog ‘Get West London’ reported the Advertising Standards Authority adjudication condemning as misleading the Brent CCG advertisement and website posting that A&E is only for life threatening emergencies. They included an response from an anonymous source for Brent CCG suggesting that the advertisement had been intended to promote patient safety, and commenting dismissively that there had only been one complaint out of…
We just don’t know the answer to the question in our title, but we need to find out a lot more. After all GPs are our gateway to the NHS and according to the last estimate in 2013 there were some 340 million consultations annually. It is now clear that there is a top-down national major re-organisation of GP and other primary care NHS health…
We can now bring readers up to date with the saga of Brent CCG’s misleading ads which said “A&E is for life-threatening emergencies only”. The ASA has found that the CCG breached the Advertising Code and told them not to use the ads again in their current form. Brent Patient Voice (BPV), which represents Brent patients, tried several times but failed to get the CCG…
The new Brent NHS Community Cardiology Service provided at Willesden and Wembley Centres for Health and Care continues to have serious shortcomings. Brent Patient Voice has been monitoring the introduction of this service since it started in April 2015 and is represented on the joint contract review group with the provider the Royal Free London NHS Hospital Trust (RFL) and Brent Clinical Commissioning Group (Brent…
Readers who were awake may have noticed a fleeting appearance by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on BBC London TV just before Christmas. He was announcing the London Health Devolution Agreement, supposedly signed by George Osborne himself along with all London CCGs and all London Borough Councils. Ever vigilant on behalf of Brent patients, BPV asked Brent CCG and Brent Council about the process by…