Post by caspday on Dec 26, 2012 20:17:19 GMT -5
Harmoni said it believed reporting Wholesale NFL Jerseys of its performance to the NHS was accurate and complied with the process agreed by commissioners, but it had instigated an audit following allegations put to it by the Guardian. It confirmed that raw data had sometimes been changed but said: "We believe the allegations have arisen as a result of a misunderstanding of the process we use to review raw data. In order to produce an accurate report for commissioners that reflects both performance of wholesale nike nfl jerseys the service and patients' preferences, the data is checked for duplications and inaccuracies."We put a sample of shortfalls in recent weeks to Harmoni. The Guardian was told of the routine overnight report prepared for management each morning, which says that on the night of Saturday/Sunday 10/11 November, owing to staff shortages, for most of the night only one advanced nurse practitioner was exclusively designated to assess the seriousness of calls from patients to the out of hours service for the whole of Harmoni's London contract area. This covers Brent, Barnet, Camden, City and Hackney, Ealing, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kingston, Richmond, Twickenham, and Wandsworth, a population of more than 3 million. In response, Harmoni said four GPs assigned to cars for home visits for the London area cheap nfl jerseys from china were able to cover some of the triage work, taking half of the calls from their vehicles in between home visits to assess the urgency of cases.In another example, sources say on 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 November shifts were unfilled overnight at a Harmoni clinic in St Pancras, with no qualified medic or nurse to see patients. They also allege that clinics the Harmoni service is expected to run at the Whittington hospital for patients who need an urgent out-of-hours appointment have been closed repeatedly for several hours, including on 30 November and 1 and 2 December. Harmoni did not dispute the allegations but said it did not believe safety had been compromised.Kavalier's resignation letter detailed numerous complaints from GPs, including a booked home visit to an elderly patient which never took place, and a child under two, who later needed hospital admission, being directed by a nurse on the phone at Harmoni West Sussex from the family home in south-west London to north London, many miles Wholesale Football Jerseys away. "If the child had been more ill the journey could have had serious consequences … The service is leading to patient complaints and I fear it is only a matter of time before this low level of service leads to a serious clinical incident," Kavalier wrote.Concerns about the safety of the service, the number of complaints about its quality, and allegations that its performance data were being "cleaned up" have also been made by the local GPs' representative body, the Local Medical Committee (LMC). Dr Paddy Glackin, who was secretary BE1227ZYH of the LMC until this summer, said concerns about each of these three issues had been brought to him by several Cheap Jerseys Online local GPs and staff. Dr Tom McAnea, a GP in Islington who works home-visiting shifts for the service, wrote to Harmoni's regional director in autumn 2010 saying he feared the service had become unsafe because of an aggressive cost-cutting agenda. He decided not to work shifts at Harmoni clinics after it cut the time available for appointments, because he felt it put patients at risk.Harmoni told the Guardian none of these concerns had been raised with it by the primary care trust or the LMC. It said it had adjusted GP cheap sports jerseys consultation times from 15 minutes per patient to 12 minutes to bring them in line with the average of 10 minutes elsewhere and its own surveys of what was typically needed. It said its "safety record, incidents, complaints, response times to patients and rota fills all indicate a safely run service. We refute entirely any suggestion that we have cut costs in a way that compromises the quality of the service".