Health News Blog

A culture of fear .....
....not just restricted to maternity services. We have to ask how NHS management has changed to create dreadful work relationships.

Midwives are leaving the service
The loss of midwifery staff and students underlines what the Royal College of Midwives calls the “staffing emergency” in maternity care across the UK.

Maternity poorly understood by directors
Maternity services, despite numerous scathing reviews, are still sidelined by trust boards and often poorly understood by medical directors.

Health is a national asset
A Health Foundation report says we should view good health nationally as an economic asset. Improving health would strengthen growth, expand the tax base, reduce fiscal pressures and raise living standards. 

Manchester does without Palantir
If one English region can build sovereign health data infrastructure that outperforms the imported version [Palantir], why can’t the country?

Burnham and Cooper will plough on?
The PM and his new Health Secretary Yvette Cooper look set to continue the plans set out by Keir Starmer in the Labour Manifesto and in the 10 Year Plan, says health campaigner Greg Dropkin.

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.