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WIREDGOV NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

A matter of concern for most people (eventually)

With millions of people in England living with more than one chronic health condition & hundreds of thousands more set to develop multiple problems in the future, new NICE guidance has been released to ensure care remains safe & of a high quality. It focuses on the group of people most likely to be living with more than one long-term condition – older people. It says health & social care services should work more closely together to deliver effective services and improve quality of life for those they look after.

NICE calls for care to be integrated so that better, more person-centre care can be provided for the growing number of older people with social care needs & multiple long-term conditions. The best outcomes for older people are improved quality of life, and increased independence, choice, dignity & control. These can be achieved through coordinated care that is person-centred.

However recent reports suggest that care is often fragmented & hard to access, and that some people are being treated as a collection of conditions or symptoms rather than as a whole person. To help tackle these issues NICE’s new guideline provides services with a framework for acting more effectively so that they can offer appropriate care to those who most need it.

Researched Links:

NICE guideline to improve quality of life for older people with multiple long-term conditions who need social care support

NICE: Integrated care ‘critically important’ for older people with social care needs & multiple long-term conditions

IFG: Devolution will only work if public services are reformed

Kings Fund: Social care budget cuts damaging the NHS, latest quarterly monitoring report finds

LGA: 40% funding reduction would devastate local services & communities, councils warn

CQC: State of Care report launched

WAO: The Welsh public sector needs to shift its focus to maintain the independence of older people

CQC: Work begins with Age UK encouraging people to "tell us about your care"

Patients in South Devon set to get integrated care after hospital acquisition

If NHS needs +£8bn, what do LA’s need for social care?

It’s bad enough being ill without suffering lack of good care

When it’s your own care it gets very personal

It’s like running a car; the older we get the more ‘maintenance’ we need

Hardly ‘rocket science’ so why is it taking so long

The NHS is not the only ‘care service’ with a funding ‘Black Hole’

Hospitals are too expensive for anything but specialist ‘non-mobile’ treatment

Without them Social Care & the NHS would collapse

Local direction by local leaders to boost local economies & services

Protecting the liberty of those who are less able to protect themselves

Provision of a service does not mean people know about it

Let’s hope ‘pooling’ works better for the NHS than for the euro group

Longer independent living is vital for the NHS funding ‘crisis

Evolving the NHS & Social Care will require the involvement of both providers & users

It is not so much dying that worries us, as HOW we will die

Sadly the guidance is necessary

No excuse now for sub-standard care due to ignorance of standards

London Borough of Brent:
The UK’s 1^st Cashless Council

The definition of a Cashless Council or Local Authority is one where all cash transactions have been removed completely from the transactional payments workflow.

A number of Local Authorities across the UK have trialled cashless systems across different areas such for catering, parking and payments with limited adoption and success but the London Borough of Brent is the UK's first genuine Cashless Local Authority as a result of the initial design and launch of a number of social disbursement prepaid card programmes.

Once other council departments realised the savings and efficiencies being made, they launched incremental programmes including payroll, petty cash and guardianship accounts. The Council finally decided to replace all cash payments in and out with electronic solutions – delivering powerful cost savings and revenue returns for the Council.

Click here to find out more and download the full Brent CC success story.

4^th time lucky?

Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) has published a report saying ‘there should be no British airstrikes in Syria without a coherent international strategy to both defeat ISIL and end the Syrian civil war’. The Committee finds that the benefits of extending British involvement in Coalition airstrikes in Syria are more than outweighed by the risks of legal ambiguity, political chaos on the ground in Syria, military irrelevance, and diplomatic costs.

FAC is not persuaded by the Government’s efforts to treat ISIL & the Syrian civil war as separate issues, and considers that the focus on the extension of airstrikes against ISIL in Syria is a distraction from the much bigger & more important task of finding a resolution to conflict in Syria, which is itself a main cause of ISIL’s rise.

Researched Links:

PC&PE: Extension of offensive British military operations to Syria report published

Better intelligence & more strategic input needed in MOD decision making

RUSI: Should the UK bomb Daesh in Syria?

Arguments for Military Intervention in Syria

Arguments against Military Intervention in Syria

Military Action in Syria: Plucking Legal Justifications out of Thin Air

Syria - A Collision Course for Intervention

Conflicts, instability uproot over 4.5m children in 5 countries: Unicef

Air Power Conference 2015

Diplomats not just military intervention must be part of long-term solutions

To remedy the growing imbalance between its spending on defence, development & diplomacy, the UK government must reverse cuts to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s budget. In the long term, the UK should commit to increase spending on the UK's overall diplomatic effort to 0.2% of GDP.

Researched Links:

RUSI - Strengthening Britain’s Voice in the World

Unfortunately, isolationism will not provide a ‘safe & secure future for the UK

Lords Soft Power Committee releases 'Persuasion & Power' report

Remember how reducing defence forces in the Falklands proved costly in terms of both money & lives

Keeping our ‘seat at the top table’ cannot be done just with force of arms

RUSI launches new website

‘Reassurance’ is essential part of support

Communities Secretary Greg Clark has urged more councils to contact their local branch of the Alzheimer’s Society and offer training to their staff to help the society reach 4m Dementia Friends by 2020. There are already over 1.3m Dementia Friends across England – part of the biggest ever initiative to change people’s perceptions and transform the way the nation thinks, talks & acts about the condition.

Researched Links:

CLG: Greg Clark calls on councils to support Dementia Friends

Dementia friendly A&E departments in Wales

LGA: Firefighters tackle dementia, cot deaths and childhood obesity as local authorities embrace public health responsibilities

Unlike ‘Death & Taxes’ we CAN do something about it

Supplier Locator: November update…

Many of WiredGov’s stakeholder departments within Central Government have been working hard to deliver on the Government’s pledge that 25% of all direct and indirect central government spend should be with SMEs by 2015 but there is still a great deal more work to be done.

Against this backdrop, our Supplier Locator service has been developed specifically to embrace the SME Agenda and provide the ideal platform for SME’s to promote their services, solutions, accreditation and success stories directly to our ever increasing audience across all government and public sector verticals and Tier 1 suppliers.The most recent arrivals to the Supplier Locator include:

Henderson Services LLP	Total Intelligence
Stratus Coaching	uComply

Click here to find out how to register your company with the Supplier Locator.

They need all the help they can get

With one month to go until launch date, the government has confirmed the 5 simple steps first time buyers need to follow to claim their government bonus from the Help to Buy: ISA.

HMT: 1 month to go to the Help to Buy: ISA government bonus – are you ready to save for yours?

The ‘Law’ needs to reflect the times

A scoping report issued by the Law Commission is recommending reforms that would:

replace the outdated Offences Against the Person Act 1861 with modern, clear & logical legislation
create a new offence of ‘aggravated assault’, to bridge the gap between common assault and the much more serious actual bodily harm (ABH)
extend the offence of threats to kill to include threats to cause serious injury and threats to rape

Law Commission: Offences against the person – modernising the law on violence

It’s not just GCHQ looking at your communications

CESG has released new guidance for Secure Voice Technology. Voice data is subject to a number of key threats:

calls are placed to or received from an attacker and the user doesn't realise, resulting in compromise of spoken data
attacker with privileged network access can access all call content & metadata for a user on that network
attacker compromises a cellular base station, or uses a false base station, and gains access to all call content & metadata for all users on that base station

attacker could cause calls to be routed via infrastructure they control (e.g. offering low-cost routing), enabling interception

CESG releases new guidance for secure voice technology

CESG: Next generation of Ectocryp Blue is certified

‘Catch & inspire them young’

Code Club has announced it is joining forces with the Raspberry Pi Foundation(RPF) to help many more young people learn how to build their ideas with code. The RPF is the UK-based charity behind the low-cost, high performance computers. Since launching their first product in February 2012, it has sold over 7m computers, and all profits are directed to the RPF's charitable goal of ‘putting the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world’.

techUK: Code Club and Raspberry Pi Foundation

Export Week, 9-13 November 2015

Export finance advisers are available for businesses wanting to increase their international business or at the start of their export journey. Across export week there will be a varied series of events all over the UK. Export finance advisers will be at many of these events, and can provide guidance on overcoming financial barriers to exporting. They also introduce exporters & businesses with export potential to finance providers, credit insurers, insurance brokers, trade support bodies & sources of government support

UK Export Finance: Get advice from UK Export Finance during Export Week, 9-13 November 2015

Qualifications are necessary, but experience is critical

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has launched its Foundation Certificate in User Experience (UX), working with UX professionals to ensure a robust certification that reflects the skills needed in industry. The Certificate is aligned to SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) and the syllabus is based around the ISO 9241-210 standard - the international standard for human-centred design of interactive systems.

BCS launches industry-led UX certification

‘Without fear or favour’

The Crown Prosecution Service has been fined £200,000 by the ICO after laptops containing videos of police interviews were stolen from a private film studio. The interviews were with 43 victims & witnesses. They involved 31 investigations, nearly all of which were ongoing and of a violent or sexual nature. Some of the interviews related to historical allegations against a high-profile individual.

ICO: CPS fined £200,000 for failing to keep recorded police interviews with victims & witnesses secure

More contributions to the UK constitutional debate

More news, opinions, documents, claims & counter-claims;

Researched Links:

ScotGov: Call for cancellation of tax credit cuts

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