Patients will be able to book doctors’ appointments on their laptops and receive sick notes by email as part of a drive to modernise GPs’ services.
The plans – dubbed ‘the start of the doc.com era’ by one Whitehall policy adviser – would also allow test results, repeat prescriptions and medical records to be accessed online.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley will announce the reforms tomorrow, saying he wants to ‘take the hassle out of the health service’ and ‘end the 8am rush to book GP appointments on the phone’.
Some of the reforms have been trialled in surgeries and will be rolled out nationwide by 2015.
New research has mapped the way that MRSA “superbug” bacteria spread, BBC News has reported. The results suggest that antibiotic-resistant bacteria may often spread from large, inner-city hospitals to smaller regional ones when patients are transferred.
The way that superbugs spread has been researched as part of an intricate study conducted by Scottish researchers, who looked at samples taken across the UK over 53 years. The researchers used genetic techniques to scan patterns and mutations within the various samples and to build up a “family tree” showing how a particular strain (called EMRSA-16) has spread between different hospitals across the country. They found that EMRSA-16 has generally spread by transmission from hospitals in large population centres in London and Glasgow to regional healthcare settings. The researchers suggested that patients’ referrals are an important cause of the spread of this bug across the country.
This type of study can provide useful estimates of transmission routes of MRSA, although there is still a need for further research incorporating a larger number of sampled hospitals to determine the wider UK pattern.
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Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of CS MEN Regional Champion Jerry Morse, please find attached an invitation to attend a Regional Workshop, taking place at the Centre for Health Science, Inverness on Monday 18th June starting at 10am.
