Heat-health alert for East of England

A red heat-health warning has been issued by the UKHSA. The warning is in effect from the morning of 24 June 2026 through to the night of 25 Jun 2026. Please ensure you keep up to date with weather reports reports and plan accordingly.

UKHSA weather warning guidance

The Supreme Court's judgment on deprivation of liberty

You may be aware that the Supreme Court has recently issued a judgment which significantly changes the legal approach to determining whether a person is deprived of their liberty. The judgement can be seen here A Reference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland of a devolution issue under paragraph 34 o….

We would encourage you to familiarise yourselves with the judgment and carefully consider the implications for your services and practice. Please see the following links for further information: CQC statement on the Supreme Court's judgment on deprivation of liberty - Care Quality Commission and 2026-UKSC-16-Summary-for-website.pdf.

We ask that you refer to this updated position when making any new referrals to the DoLS team.  In addition, as the change came into effect immediately from 2 June, please review any recent DoLS referrals you have made. You should consider whether, in light of this revised approach, any of these referrals may no longer be appropriate.

We hope this offers reassurance whilst we wait for additional National guidance to be disseminated.  At this stage we don’t have further information, but if you have a specific query, you can contact the MCA DoLS Duty Team at Dolforms@essex.gov.uk

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Conducting Plan, Do, Study, Act cycles

Having completed a Driver Diagram and decided which 'Secondary Driver' you are going to try and adapt and improve, you then need to 'test' this change to see if it does actually lead to an improvement.

The Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) cycle is a structured method of doing this, which encourages you to review and adapt the change if necessary before it is adopted or ultimately discarded.

The four elements of a PDSA cycle are:

  1. Plan - What is your SMART aim? What test of change do you want to try? What do you expect to happen? How will this be measured?
  2. Do - How are you going to conduct this 'test'? - Who, what, when?
  3. Study - Analyse the results. Were your predictions achieved? Did the test run smoothly?
  4. Act - Are you going to adopt the change? Does it need to be adapted or rejected. In most cases there will be a need for further PDSA cycles to be conducted.

 

Changes need not be big; often a small change can have a big impact. Additionally, do not be despondent if all changes do not lead to an improvement. The information you have gathered during the test is still extremely useful.

Remember: All improvement requires a change, but not all changes will lead to an improvement!

You need to continually review progress during a PDSA cycle to ensure it is improving the situation. You may notice a situation similar to the graph below, where an initial improvement is noted, but then things start to 'level off'. In these situations, a slight 'tweak' to the change may be needed, or you may need to introduce a further additional change in order to achieve your SMART aim.

It can often be tempting to abandon a change, and go back to the previous situation, if an improvement is not immediately evident. However, the structure of a PDSA cycle forces consideration of re-testing the change with a slight 'tweak' or addition, rather than 'casting it aside'. It is unlikely that any of the great inventions throughout history worked perfectly at the first attempt.

Last updated: 10/09/2025
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