Health News Blog

Starmer failed, Burnham must do better
The joint chairmen of Keep Our NHS Public say, "We need commitment to a publicly funded, provided and accountable NHS, not an ever-closer relationship with the parasitic private sector". Burnham could rebuild trust "A new leadership can do better by offering a confident public service renewal agenda: rebuild trust, back staff, restore capacity and ethical standards".

US/UK drug deal will cost 000s in excess deaths
Research in the British Medical Journal reveals that the diversion of billions of NHS funding to pay more for new drugs under the UK-US trade deal will harm public health and result in thousands of excess deaths. An opinion piece makes the same point "So here’s a test for Andy Burnham: is he really going to let this fatal deal, cooked up in private and shrouded in unforgivable secrecy, stand?"

Sheffield opposes Palantir contract
Sheffield City Council becomes the first local authority in England to approve a motion opposing Palantir's NHS Federated Data Platform contract. The Telegraph says that Burnham will follow suit, but yet nobody else agrees, so don't believe anything in the Telegraph.

Open letter to Burnham
"....Commit to rethinking the dangerous US-UK deal on pharmaceuticals, the new PFI arrangements for neighbourhood health centres, job cuts underway in hospitals across England, increases in the use of private providers in community diagnostics and other areas, and the Palantir FDP contract."

NHS anaesthetist shortage
There are 16% fewer anaesthetists than needed, with a shortfall of 2,256 posts across the UK. Anaesthetists are quitting over stress and workload.

Reform's threat to our NHS
Reform UK’s proposals would have the effect of progressively replacing public ownership of healthcare with private provision funded by taxpayers. Reform proposes an insurance based health service, but such systems are inherently more expensive, owing to the administrative expense involved in insurance. The NHS is (was?) the most efficient health service because the medical front line gets a much higher percentage of the health budget.

Palantir's access to your health records
GPs and hospitals, currently the guardians of your health record, will be forced to reveal them to Palantir, a secretive US spy tech company with strong ties to Donald Trump. 

Lack of staff puts patients at risk
The Royal College of Nursing says "understaffing and the increasingly complex medical needs posed by an ageing population are creating a “deadly mix” for patients."

Petition "Trained staff not AI"
Sign a petition against replacing vital healthcare roles with AI technology, leaving patients facing fewer trained staff.

Can AI replace trained doctors?
Streeting thinks so, but James Murray will have to agree. A workforce plan being finalised by health officials says the NHS in England will have to use technology to get by with hundreds of thousands fewer staff than envisaged under the previous Conservative government.

Legal action against US drug deal
The plan arranged by Trump, says campaigners, could let the health secretary override the independent judgement by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) as to how much the NHS should pay for certain medicines.

NHS budget: brutal cuts are coming
Cuts in 2025/26 have closed health services. Now a report from the NHS Alliance reveals an even tighter financial squeeze, with bigger and potentially more damaging cuts, is on the way in many areas for 2026/27.

A&E nurse: "It wasn't like this in 2010"
A senior A&E nurse in a hospital in the south of England says "In 2010 it....was a completely different world. If a patient needed immediate attention, there was easily the capacity for two nurses to look after them straight away", and ",,, patients in my A&E can wait up to 16 hours to be seen by a doctor. Not in a million years would that have happened when I started."

1300 deaths a month due to long A&E waits
The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine says "It’s frustrating that we continue to see a lack of solutions designed to tackle the root causes of the problem. Instead, we are fobbed off with recycled ideas that haven’t ever worked." He wondered how many more deaths it would take before there was a meaningful plan to tackle the crisis?

Palantir given unlimited access to our data
NHS England plans to give Palantir and other external staff “admin” roles with broad access to identifiable patient data on the federated data platform. They will be able to see your health data before it is pseudonymised.

Can technology replace trained doctors?
A workforce plan being finalised by health officials says the NHS in England will have to use technology to get by with hundreds of thousands fewer staff than envisaged under the previous Conservative government. The reforms were drawn up while Wes Streeting was health secretary.

Campaigners legal action against US-UK drug deal
Campaigners against the UK’s controversial drug pricing deal with Donald Trump are threatening the government with legal action unless it scraps a key element of the plan.

Private patients rushed back to A&E
A record number of private patients are being blue-lighted back to NHS hospitals for emergency care. Camapigners are warning that taxpayers’ money would be better spent building up NHS hospital capacity, rather than paying profit-making firms to carry out treatments on their behalf.

Consultants hired to plan PFI
Consultancy firm Turner & Townsend has been awarded the contract, worth £735,000, to provide technical expertise on the programme’s design, cost management, and risk allocation. See also the BMA's concern about the contract. The DHSC previously awarded contracts worth £3m each to management consultants Deloitte and lawyers Addleshaw Goddard to advise them on whether to use PPPs to build Streeting's new Neighbourhood centres.

£1.8 million to get 'the right culture'
The Department of Health and Social Care is paying a management consultancy £1.8m to help it “create and drive the right target culture” and to advise on “pay strategy” as it absorbs NHS England. Some people think abolishing NHS England was ill-advised.

Private equity buys our IT systems provider
An American private equity firm has bought the company supplying more than half of England’s primary care IT systems. Private equity firm TPG confirmed as new owner of Optum UK, that owns EMIS, that itself supplies more than half of England’s GP surgeries with their IT systems.

Hedge fund to buy Spire Healthcare?
Spire operates 38 private hospitals and more than 60 clinics across Britain and delivered care to 1.36 million patients in 2025. It was founded in 2007 through the acquisition and rebranding of 25 Bupa hospitals. Spire's board has backed a buyout proposal worth £1bn from its second biggest shareholder, a hedge fund manager known as “the Rottweiler”, sending its shares soaring by nearly 50%.

Palantir staff can access patient data
The government has confirmed it is allowing staff from Palantir access to patient data following a change in policy. A document released by NHS England says that Palantir staff can get a new "admin" role and access the NDIT, a data repository for patient data before it is transferred to the "pseudonymized" analytics system and its identifiable patient data.