Global scourge of violence against staff 20 April 2018 The revelation of the sharp increase in attacks on NHS staff  highlights a problem which is serious, global and growing. The survey by the Health Service Journal and Unison showed assaults in 2016-17 were almost 10% up on the previous year, driven by big increases in hospitals that were missing treatment targets or seriously in debt. Staff in mental health trusts were more than seven times more likely to be attacked than those in other trusts. The World Health Organization says health workers are at a high risk of physical violence all over the globe, and estimates that between 8% and 38% of staff in different countries suffer at some point in their careers. A study by the International Council of Nurses concluded that healthcare workers were more likely to be attacked at work than prison guards or police officers, and that female nurses were most at risk. (On top of these attacks during day-to-day work, healthcare staff dealing with health emergencies such as wars are in enormous danger. WHO figures indicate that over the two- year period to 2015, 959 such healthcare workers were killed  and 1,561 injured across 19 countries.) Read the full article at the Guardian Healthcare Network __________________________________________________________________ Time to end 'heads on spikes' approach 6 April 2018 The leadership implosions at Liverpool community health NHS trust and Wirral University teaching hospital NHS trust have been followed by another bout of soul-searching at NHS Improvement about when and how to fire NHS managers. In an interview with HSJ, recently appointed NHS Improvement chair Dido Harding articulated widely felt disquiet over the health service’s failure to distinguish between people in senior roles whose performance has fallen short and those who have, in her words, “crossed a moral line”. She described the current approach as “a public beheading and then they pop up somewhere else, and for neither of those groups is that the right treatment”. Her comments follow HSJ’s revelation that NHS Improvement’s predecessor arranged for Liverpool’s chief executive Bernie Cuthel to move to a senior role in Manchester after the Care Quality Commission found serious failings at the trust. A subsequent inquiry uncovered bullying, patient harm and problems being hidden from regulators. At Wirral, NHS Improvement had planned to offer a secondment to chief executive David Allison after several directors raised serious concerns about culture and governance. If these are examples of the system seeking to look after those responsible for egregious failings, NHS Improvement’s national model for improving mental health care, unveiled a few days ago, highlights the dangers of sacking managers who get into difficulty while doing their best. Read the full article at the Guardian Healthcare Network __________________________________________________________________