Guidance Notes and Best Practice Guides
PwC: PwC's real estate business recovery team has worked with the British Property Federation (BPF) to develop a guide for landlords faced with distressed or insolvent tenants. There are various options for landlords who find themselves in this situation and the guide contains documents to advise landlords on the best approach.
The guide also allows landlords to check where their tenant might be on the 'corporate demise curve', which in turn will influence the options open to a business in terms of restructuring.
NE: To help farmers & growers cope with the intense spell of dry weather, Natural England is ensuring that appropriate Environmental Stewardship derogations are made available to farmers who are in agri-environment schemes (AES) and has issued advice on how they can apply for them.
NICE: NICE has given the ‘green light’ to dexamethasone for the treatment of common eye condition in draft guidance. It is also recommended following branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO)ii when:
* treatment with laser photocoagulationiii has not been beneficial, or
* treatment with laser photocoagulation is not considered suitable because of the extent of macular haemorrhage.
NICE has not yet issued final guidance to the NHS; registered stakeholders now have the opportunity to appeal against these draft recommendations and consequently they may change in the event of an appeal being received. Final guidance is likely to be published in July 2011.
Press release ~ Macular oedema (retinal vein occlusion) - dexamethasone: final appraisal determination
ScotGov: Improved care for older people will be a personal priority for Nicola Sturgeon in the new parliamentary term - with a specific focus on dementia. Ms Sturgeon announced that Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) and the Scottish Government's Chief Nursing Officer will have key roles to play to ensure high standards of care for older people are maintained.
Her comments came as the Scottish Government published two major documents as part of Scotland's first ever National Dementia Strategy. Standards of Care for Dementia have been unveiled to help people with dementia, their families & carers understand and assert their rights.
Also published is a dementia skills framework - Promoting Excellence - which will help ensure the standards are met by ensuring staff have the best professional qualifications, enhancing workforce capability and developing leadership within the dementia workforce.
Press release ~ Standards of Care for Dementia ~ Promoting Excellence ~ Scotland's National Dementia Strategy: One Year On Report
Socitm: The crisis in public sector funding will concentrate minds in local public services on the best routes to savings, including solutions like shared services which have tended to fall at the political hurdle when tried in the recent past.
This notion is set out at the beginning of Successful sharing: a practical guide for local public services published by Socitm Insight at the end of May 2011. The report suggests that the gravity of today's financial situation is simply too serious for organisations to protect current ways of delivering services. Sharing services is one of relatively few options for making substantial savings, all of which will need to be deployed if there is to be any chance of maintaining frontline services.
Moves towards shared services will also benefit from the emergence of a new technical solution - itself a virtual shared service - in the form of the public sector network, now moving beyond the early adopters and becoming a serious consideration in most sub-regions. The PSN is a potential delivery mechanism for shared data centres, storage facilities, the public sector 'cloud', remote technical expertise and customer & employee self-service.
DCMS: A new set of guidance notes for visitor visa applications to the UK, translated for the first time into local languages has been welcomed today by Tourism Minister, John Penrose. The guidance, published by the UK Border Agency, is now available in Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Hindi, Russian, Thai & Turkish and follows on from a pledge in the Government’s Tourism Strategy to make ‘guidance available in local languages wherever possible’.
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