This report online: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94511

Bevan Healthcare, a community interest company formed recently by the staff of Bevan House Primary Care Centre, took on responsibility for running the service on 1 September, as part of the NHS Transforming Community Services agenda. It will deliver primary care services to its patients on behalf of the NHS.

Full article

Source: www.bradford.nhs.uk

All doctors who want to work in the UK will have to be registered with the General Medical Council (GMC) before applying for medical posts. Currently only doctors from outside the European Economic Area (EEA), for example, doctors from Pakistan, Canada or Australia, are routinely scrutinised for their language skills before being able to register with the GMC. European law prevents the GMC from vetting the language skills of doctors from within Europe.

The Department of Health will give the GMC explicit new powers to be able to take action against doctors when there are concerns about their ability to speak English.

In addition, the Department will introduce new powers so doctors can be vetted for their language skills at local level. NHS doctors are overseen by ‘responsible officers’, who make sure that they are appropriately trained and qualified for the role. The regulations governing the roles of these responsible officers will be amended so that they have a mandatory duty to check the English language skills of all foreign doctors before they can be employed by the NHS in England.

Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said:

“There is considerable anxiety amongst the public about the ability of doctors to speak English properly. We will amend the legislation to prevent all foreign doctors with a poor grasp of English from working in England. If you can’t speak adequate English, you can’t treat patients.”

The Department of Health will continue to work with the General Medical Council to implement the changes, so that the GMC has more effective means of ensuring that all doctors practising in the UK have the language skills they need.

* Friday 23 September 2011, 9.30-5pm

* Stratford Circus, Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15 1BX

Speakers include:

* Dr Ike Anya – Consultant in Public Health Medicine

* Dr Yusef Azad – Director of Policy and Campaigns at the NAT

* Dr Kambiz Boomla – Clinical Senior Lecturer

* Dr Angela Burnett – GP at the City and Hackney Sanctuary Practice

* Paul Corrigan – Former Director of Strategy and Commissioning for NHS London

* Marie Gabriel – Chair of NHS East London & City

* Dr Paramjit Gill – RCGP Clinical Champion of Social Inclusion

* Adam Hundt – Solicitor at Pierce Glynn Solicitors

* Dr Hiranthi Jayaweera – Senior Researcher at COMPAS

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FOOTNOTE

Hosted by the Migrants’ Rights Network (http://www.migrantsrights.org.uk/), please see the websites below to see cost of attending.

> RELATED LINKS

Access to Universal Health Care in the Age of Migration (http://health4migrants.info/)

Migrants’ Rights Network (http://www.migrantsrights.org.uk/)

The Guardian reported that two men died from suspected heart attacks at Colnbrook near Heathrow airport.  One of the men is Muhammad Shukat, who was 47 years old and of Pakistani nationality.  He died on 2 July.  The article reports that there was some considerable delay between the time that Muhammad Shukat collapsed at 6am and when his roommate raised the alarm and the time when an ambulance was actually called at 7.20am.  A post-mortem found the provisional cause of death to be coronary heart disease.

The second man who died at Colnbrook has not yet been named, but he seems to have been relatively young at 35 years of age.  He was found dead in his cell at 10.30am on 31 July. The post-mortem found the cause of death to be a ruptured aorta and his death is being treated as unexplained.

The third man, also aged 35 years old, killed himself at the Campsfield House detention centre in Oxfordshire on 2 August.

As Emma Ginn from Medical Justice says in the Guardian article, this only highlights the already very high level of concern held in respect of the provision of healthcare in detention centres.  Whether that is in response to emergencies or in terms of longer term medical conditions.  She sets out that:

“Based on medical evidence from many hundreds of detainees, Medical Justice has documented the disturbingly inadequate healthcare provision that often vulnerable immigration detainees are subjected to in Colnbrook and other immigration removal centres… [this] combined with the perilous and frightening conditions of detention, is a lethal cocktail, a disaster waiting to happen.”

A smidgeon of comfort is to be found in the recent case-law on unlawful detention. Faced with such tragic events, I do have difficulty with describing the courts’ favourable rulings a success.  Nevertheless, the High Court ruled on Friday 5 August in S v SSHD [2011] EWHC 2120 (Admin) that the UKBA had unlawfully detained a man with serious mental illness between April and September 2010 and that the circumstances of his detention at Harmondsworth breached Article 3 ECHR, the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment.

It was well documented in S’s case that, both from his time in prison and in a psychiatric hospital, that detention had caused deterioration in his psychiatric state, precipitating psychotic symptoms and incidents of serious self harm.  The medical reports that followed S from the hospital on 23 April 2010 specifically warned that detention would cause him to regress to a state that he would once again require hospital admission.  However in deciding to detain S, the UKBA, inexplicably, stated that there was “no evidence” that he was mentally ill. The High Court found that the failure at the outset to understand and appreciate the nature and degree of S’s mental illness and to apply its own published policy regarding the detention of those with serious mental conditions to the circumstances of S’s case was repeated by UKBA officials until his release on bail by the High Court on 29 September 2010.

It is believed to be the first time that a UK court has found detention at an immigration removal centre to have breached Article 3 and the case has been adjourned for the issue of relief and damages to be considered (see here for press release and here for the full judgment).

And talking of damages, the Court of Appeal found in OM, R (on the application of) v SSHD [2011] EWCA Civ 909 that though the detention of a mentally ill person was unlawful due to a failure by the Secretary of State to consult her own policy, she was not entitled to damages as she could have been lawfully detained if the policy had been applied.  By now that outcome will probably sound familiar to you and of course follows the Supreme Court judgment in Lumba (see here for previous FM post).

So I have to ask:  if ordering the UKBA to pay damages is not option, do we have to wait for more deaths and/or inhuman and degrading treatment before we truly get to the bottom of this ?

For more statistics compiled by Medical Justice see here.

This report online: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93319

The Mental Health Strategic Partnership brings together eight national mental health voluntary sector organisations to work with the Department of Health to support effective communication about mental health policy and practice in England. The partnership comprises of the Afyia Trust; Mental Health Foundation; Mental Health Helplines Partnership;  Mental Health Providers Forum; Mind; National Survivors User Network; Centre for Mental Health and Rethink Mental Illness.

The two briefings, No Health without Mental Health: a guide for general practice and No Health without Mental Health: a guide for community organisations, explain in practical terms the ways in which general practitioners, community groups and voluntary organisations can improve life chances for people with mental health conditions.

Download the briefing papers here:

http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/news/2011_Centre_launches_briefing_sheets.aspx

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Source: Pulse

This thesis is concerned with the health-related quality of life of two groups of refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who are resident in Britain and France.

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Source: Guardian