Section:GDN 1N PaGe:24 Edition Date:190830 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/8/2019 20:01 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Friday 30 Aug ust 2019
(^24) National
Hospital
buildings on
the critical
list, NHS
bosses warn
Denis Campbell
Health policy editor
Hospital patients’ safety is being put
at risk by fi res, fl oods and crumbling,
overcrowded buildings caused by a
£4bn government squeeze on capital
funding, NHS bosses are to warn today.
Hospitals say they have too little
money to replace outdated scanners,
or remove ligature points, which sui-
cidal patients might use to try to end
their lives, or fi x leaking roofs and bro-
ken boilers.
Four out of fi ve (82%) chief execu-
tives and chief fi nance offi cers at NHS
trusts in England fear that the lack of
capital funding poses a medium or
high risk to patient safety.
Almost all (97%) of the 161 bosses
surveyed by NHS Providers, which
represents NHS hospital and ambu-
lance services, are “worried” by how
much money their trust needs to
undertake urgent repairs. Almost as
many (94%) are concerned that their
inability to tackle problems is aff ecting
patients’ experience of care.
Rising numbers of arrivals means
that the A&E unit at Kettering general
hospital is often so overcrowded that
staff cannot clearly see some of the
sickest patients, making proper mon-
itoring of their conditions diffi cult.
The unit was built in 1994 to handle
110 patients a day but now sees as
many as 300 when it gets busy. That
mismatch has led to “significant
overcrowding”, delays in treatment,
children having to wait in corridors
and ambulances having to queue out-
side the A&E before handing patients
over, which hits 999 response times.
NHS chiefs’ acute concern over the
mounting disruption because of a lack
of capital funds comes after ministers
diverted more than £4bn intended for
those purposes in recent years into the
NHS’s revenue budget to help pay for
its day-to-day running costs.
It emerged this week that Sheffi eld
Teaching Hospitals NHS trust has had
to close four wards, a total of 120 beds,
in the Sir Robert Hadfi eld wing at its
Northern general hospital since last
November because the fi re brigade
deemed the facilities a fi re risk and
issued a prohibition order.
The Health Service Journal also dis-
closed that a 52-bed major trauma unit
at Oxford University Hospitals trust
has been closed since the Grenfell
Tower fi re in 2017 over concerns that
the building’s cladding is inadequate.
Boris Johnson has promised £1.8bn
in extra capital funding for the NHS, to
fund upgrades at 20 trusts and build
new facilities. But NHS Providers said
that this “can only be considered a fi rst
down-payment of the NHS’s needs”.
It has a £6bn maintenance backlog, of
which £1bn is to urgently tackle prob-
lems threatening patient safety.
Before next week’s spending review
it wants ministers to bring forward
a multiyear capital funding settle-
ment and commit to increasing the
proportion of GDP spent on health
infrastructure from 0.3% to the 0.6%
seen in comparable countries.
Since 2017 St Mary’s hospital in
London has been aff ected by fl oods,
electrical issues and drainage prob-
lems. They have included a ceiling
collapsing in an elderly care ward.
In addition, 20 surgical beds and two
operating theatres had to close for two
weeks because of fl ooding and it has
been unable to use the 32 beds in its
Grafton ward since May 2018 because
the fl oor is too weak to support them.
The archaic nature of much of the
estate at Imperial College Health-
care NHS trust, which runs St Mary’s
and four other hospitals, means that
its maintenance backlog would cost
£1.3bn to repair – almost a quarter of
the health service’s total bill.
A Department of Health and Social
Care spokesperson said there were
plans for “a more strategic approach
with a new health infrastructure plan
that will set the priorities for the NHS
over the long term”.
£6bn
The maintenance backlog faced by
the NHS, £1bn of which is to tackle
problems aff ecting patient safety
82%
The proportion of hospital chiefs
in England who say lack of funding
poses a medium to high risk to safety
£1.8bn
The amount Boris Johnson pledged
in extra capital funding earlier this
month to fund hospital upgrades
In numbers
Apple says sorry for letting
workers listen to Siri users
Alex Hern
Technology editor
Apple has apologised for allowing con-
tractors to listen to voice recordings of
Siri users in order to grade the voice
assistant’s responses.
The company made the
we have not been fully living up to our
high ideals, and for that we apologise,”
Apple said in an unsigned statement
posted to its website. “As we previ-
ously announced, we halted the Siri
grading program. We plan to resume
later this fall [autumn] when software
updates are released to our users.”
The company promised three
changes to the way Siri is run after it
resumes the grading programme.
It will no longer keep audio record-
ings of Siri users by default, though
it will retain automatically generated
transcripts of the requests.
Users will be able to opt in to shar-
ing their recordings with Apple. “ We
hope that many people will choose to
help Siri get better ,” the company said.
Thirdly, only Apple employees will
be allowed to listen to th e audio sam-
ples. The company had previously
outsourced the work.
In the past six months, every major
producer of voice-assistant technol-
ogy has been revealed to be operating
human oversight programmes, hav-
ing run them in secret for years. Many
have pledged to change their systems.
Amazon, the fi rst to be identifi ed , has
built a setting that allows users to opt
out of the review process.
Google has paused the programme
in Europe after a leak of recordings
and pledged to review its safeguards.
However, it has not changed its gen-
eral human oversight practices.
Microsoft has made no changes to its
programme, which not only involved
listening to its Cortana voice assistant
but also to Skype conversations that
were conducted with a translation fea-
ture turned on. It did, however, update
its privacy policy when the practice
was discovered.
announcement after a review of the
grading programme triggered by a
Guardian report revealing its exist-
ence. According to multiple former
graders , accidental activations were
regularly sent for review, with record-
ings of confi dential information, illegal
acts and even Siri users having sex.
“As a result of our review, we realise
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