London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.

By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.

Many other sites across the capital will go on to break the annual limit and Putney High Street exceeded the hourly limit over 1,100 times in 2016. Oxford Street, Kings Road in Chelsea and the Strand are other known pollution hotspots.

NO2 pollution, which is produced largely by diesel vehicles, causes 9,500 early deaths every year in London. Most air quality zones across the country break legal limits and the crisis was called a “public health emergency” by MPs in April. This week scientists said that one in 10 cases of Alzheimer’s in people living near busy roads could be linked to air pollution.

The new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has pledged new measures and to double funding to £875m over five years to tackle the problem. But the UK government’s plans have twice been ruled illegal in the past two years and it has been sent back to the drawing board to develop a third strategy.

Alan Andrews, a lawyer at ClientEarth – the group that successfully sued the government – said: “This is another shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution and shows why the mayor has rightly made tackling it a top priority. It is absolutely essential that he now delivers on his promises and that the national government back him to the hilt.”

Andrews, who lives in Brixton, said Khan had promised an expanded ultra-low emission zone in 2019, which limits polluting vehicles, and to deploy the cleanest buses on the most polluted roads.

NO2 pollution in London

How UK citites compare on nitrogen dioxide exceedance

“While these are vital steps in the right direction, we can’t wait another three years for action,” he said. “We need immediate action to cut pollution in the short-term and protect Londoners’ health during these pollution spikes.” In December, Khan issued air pollution alerts at bus stops, tube stations and roadsides due to high levels.

A spokesman for the mayor said: “The Brixton Road [breach] underscores why urgent action is needed to improve air quality across London.” He said Khan would shortly be announcing 10 new low emission bus zones, including one for Brixton Road.

“But this is not enough,” said the spokesman. “The government needs to match the Mayor’s commitment to improving air quality as quickly as possible.”

In December, Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City pledged to ban polluting diesel cars from their centres by 2025 and a number of cities outside the UK have already taken action such as banning cars on specific days or making public transport free.

The government must produce a new national plan by April and ClientEarth said this must include clean air zones in many areas to stop the dirtiest diesel cars entering pollution hotspots. ClientEarth also said the “peverse” financial incentives that encourage people to buy diesel cars rather than cleaner ones must be ended.

Both a national network of clean air zones and tax changes were proposed within government as part of its last plan, but were rejected by the Treasury.

This week new data also revealed that modern diesel cars produce 10 times more NO2 pollution than heavy trucks and buses per litre of fuel, which experts say is due to the much tougher testing faced by heavy vehicles.

London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

NHS trusts overshoot maximum annual deficit in just six months

NHS trusts in England have overshot their maximum deficit permissible for the financial year after just six months despite a £900m emergency cash injection from the government.

NHS Improvement (NHSI) said financial performance information from providers show they are on track to record a year-to-date deficit of £648m in the first half of the year.

The financial regulator described the figures, published on Friday, as “just £22m worse than planned” but they are some way off what health leaders have defined as an acceptable overspend for 2016-17, even by the most generous interpretation.

NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, and Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, have pledged to ensure that trusts end the year no more than £250m in the red, while other NHS leaders have said the service can afford to record a figure of £580m without risking major financial problems.

Trusts are forecasting a deficit of £669m for the year, although that is after the £1.8bn sustainability and transformation funding, £900m of which was paid out in the first six months.

Sally Gainsbury, senior policy analyst at thinktank the Nuffield Trust, said: “More and more people need healthcare, yet the money available to provide it is tightly squeezed.

“NHSI’s report shows hospitals and other services are now forecasting a deficit of around £670m by the end of this financial year. That looks like a huge turnaround from last year’s deficit, yet is in fact flattered by the inclusion of an extra £1.8bn of emergency support pumped into the hospital sector, making the real forecast more like £2.5bn.”

NHSI said the deficit could be limited to £580m “if providers met their savings targets in full over the remaining half of the year”, but analysts and trusts expressed doubts.

The King’s Fund’s director of policy, Richard Murray, praised the trusts’ hard work on deficit reduction but warned “the second half of the year is likely to prove more challenging than the first”.

Anita Charlesworth, director of research and economics at the Health Foundation, said: “NHS trusts will have a mountain to climb if they are not to breach the end of year deficit target.”

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents trusts, said its members were already “straining every sinew” to deliver savings.

“Significant risk remains as NHS trusts will have to increase their rate of savings in the third and fourth quarters to enable the sector to meet the target year-end position of a £580m deficit,” he said.

Hopson stressed that given the deficit reduction plan had been significantly aided by sustainability and transformation plan funding, action was needed in the medium and long term to address the “clear and widening gap between what’s being asked of the service and the funding available”.

NHSI lauded a second successive quarter in which fewer trusts reported a deficit against a backdrop of “unprecedented growth in demand”.

The chief executive, Jim Mackey, said: “No one should underestimate the challenge of turning around a very difficult financial position for the NHS. But, thanks to a phenomenal effort by staff across the NHS, we’re one-nil up at half time.”

NHS trusts overshoot maximum annual deficit in just six months

These days in healthcare: Simon Stevens speaks at the NHS Confederation annual conference

Hello and welcome to the dwell blog from the Guardian’s local community for healthcare specialists. We are reporting from the NHS Confederation yearly conference, which will hear speeches from Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, Rob Webster, chief executive of NHS Confederation and Sir Stuart Rose, NHS adviser and former chief executive of Marks and Spencer.

In advance of the occasion, Dennis Campbell, health correspondent for the Guardian, wrote that only an injection of income can avert an NHS crisis. He writes:

Abruptly the rhetoric around the NHS has got extremely dramatic. The support is “at a defining second”. Says who? None other than Simon Stevens, NHS England’s new chief executive. His self-declared mission: to make the NHS sustainable. No pressure, eh? Interestingly, the ex-Labour unique adviser personally wooed by David Cameron to consider the occupation appears relaxed about being noticed so broadly as the service’s saviour.

He continues:

The Much better Care Fund, which is due to get almost £2bn out of hospitals’ £40bn-odd budgets from April 2015 in purchase to set up new services elsewhere, is a specific issue. Hospital bosses – doubtless self-interested, declare the expected 15% reduction in emergency work just is not achievable. The King’s Fund says it is “totally unrealistic” to count on that the necessary new solutions will have been produced elsewhere by April to permit this kind of a big and overnight switch of sources to occur painlessly.

Campbell has also reported that Simon Stevens is expected to say thatthe NHS must turn into planet leader in personalised medicine. Stevens will use his first main policy speech to embrace the prospective of what he calls an ongoing “worldwide health care revolution” that holds out the prospect of sufferers obtaining a much better likelihood of beating conditions this kind of as cancer.

And, Tim Kelsey, director of patient involvement at NHS England, has written that a much better NHS demands freedom for leaders. He writes about the Hurley Group – an NHS organisation that runs a variety of practices and GP stroll-in centres across the capital – which has developed a services that allows patients to seek the advice of their GP employing an on the internet instrument that captures a history which the GP can use to triage remotely.

He adds:

The well being and care services needs to learn how to liberate employees and patients – tapping into this power source is key to sustainable substantial-top quality outcomes for individuals, carers and clientele. I have made a emphasis on promoting transparency (greater data) and participation (frequently via innovative makes use of of technological innovation) as crucial to a wellness service centered on the requirements of the people it serves, but they are also instruments of leadership.

Tim Kelsey says the health service requirements to understand how to ‘liberate employees and patients’.

These days in healthcare: Simon Stevens speaks at the NHS Confederation annual conference

NHS hospitals endure annual reduction for initial time in eight many years

NHS hospitals can not employ required numbers of staff without having busting budgets, specialists warn. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

NHS hospitals will finish the economic yr in the red for the first time in eight many years, in accordance to official figures, with 26 loss-making trusts reporting a combined deficit of £456.8m.

The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust has run up the biggest deficit: £39.8m. The figures published on Thursday will renew fears that the NHS’s finances have been deteriorating sharply in current months, specially as a consequence of a lot of trusts obtaining to employ additional staff, notably nurses, in order to ensure secure and higher-high quality care in the wake of the Mid Staffordshire scandal.

Specialists which includes Professor Chris Ham, the chief executive of the King’s Fund thinktank, are warning that hospitals can’t hire the necessary number of workers with no busting their budgets.

Right after surpluses at other hospital trusts are taken into account, NHS hospitals all round will finish the monetary 12 months £112m in the red, the 1st loss recorded given that 2006.

The losses of £456.8m had been recorded by 26 of the 102 hospital trusts that have not attained basis trust status.

That will translate into a deficit of £247m by the finish of March for the 102 NHS trusts of that kind as soon as the £210m surplus created by the other 76 is taken into account. The figures seem in the newest financial-functionality evaluation of the sector drawn up by the NHS Believe in Improvement Authority (TDA), an arm of the Division of Well being.

That £247m overspend will alarm ministers and NHS bosses due to the fact it is a lot more than three times increased than the £76m net deficit the TDA predicted for its trusts in April last 12 months. A paper on economic efficiency, which its board will consider on Thursday, refers to the unexpectedly gloomy place as an “adverse variance of £171m”.

The 26 trusts have incurred the losses despite all hospitals in England sharing most of the £400m of extra funding announced by the well being secretary, Jeremy Hunt to assist them cope with what a lot of physicians had predicted would demonstrate to be the service’s toughest winter.

Once the £135m surplus for 2013-14 generated by England’s 147 basis trusts is taken into consideration, that leaves hospitals collectively facing a deficit of £112m for what has been a demanding yr, with unprecedented stress from ministers, NHS England, regulators and critiques to boost care requirements.

Of the foundation trusts, 39 assume to end the 12 months in deficit – almost double the 21 that did so a yr just before – according to the regulator Check.

That implies that in total 65 hospital trusts will have run up an overspend this year, a massive enhance on 2012-13.

The Division of Overall health insisted that the NHS as a entire, when the finances of the 211 GP-led clinical commissioning groups had been included, would end the year in the black.

“We are insisting on compassionate care, and trusts are expanding nursing numbers to ensure protected staffing ranges, which has inevitably put pressure on finances in the quick phrase,” said a spokeswoman.

“We are placing in location recovery plans for any trusts in monetary problems, but eventually, we do not accept that safe care fees far more – and we continue to be assured that the NHS will provide inside of budget at the end of this economic year. Since this government has taken hard economic choices, we have been able to boost the NHS spending budget to help improved patient demand and the demands of an ageing population.”

NHS hospitals endure annual reduction for initial time in eight many years