Health News Blog

Why no NHS staffing plan?
Sajid Javid has announced a delivery plan to tackle the backlog in an NHS that has 100,000 vacancies including about 8,000 medical and 40,000 nursing professionals. All successful organisations rely on long-term workforce planning to meet demand, so why do we treat the NHS and social care as an exception? 

Doctors call for action on racial inequality report
Health officials have paid lip service to racism in the NHS for years, but that has got us nowhere. The voices calling for real action come from all dirtections.

A depressing analysis of the NHS Bill
Peter Roderick and Allyson Pollock reveal the awful truth about the government's NHS Bill - it's the end of the Bevan model of high quality comprehensive healthcare.

Do you know what PHM is?
The NHS Bill introduces Population Health Management into the NHS. To quote NHS England "PHM uses data to understand what factors are driving poor outcomes in different population groups". But don't we know already what these are - poor diet, inadequate housing, lack of exercise, occupational factors? Here, a campaigner takes the PHM's advocates to task.

Dido Harding's appointment was unlawful
Well, did you expect otherwise? Yet another example of Johnson government illegal trickery; well done the Good Law Project.

Denied emergency care twice
Look what the Tories are doing to our NHS. Now you may get emergency care only from the A&E nearest to your home. A woman with severe burns was advised owing to a 5 hour wait to go to another A&E (Rochdale), but then was told by Fairfield Hospital in Bury that they wouldn't treat her, "go back to Rochdale".

NHS patients 'warehoused' in "care hotels"
Inadequate care home provision in England's disastrous social care service has forced NHS England to invent "care hotels" - hotels that offer so-called "domicillary care" owqing to a shortage of homecare workers. In this one in Plymouth a bath is full of clinical waste.

Do we need management consultants to plan backlog care?
NHS England will fund integrated care systems to spend up to £42 million on management consultancies help with elective recovery plans. Wouldn't spending this huge sum on employing more doctors and nurses be more effective? There are 100,000 vacancies in the NHS.

Repairing the NHS: ministers are the problem
New waiting list targets will achieve nothing if the government refuses to commit to workforce planning. "The truth is that Tory resistance to forward planning, as well as insufficient spending, lies at the heart of the NHS’s difficulties."

27% rise in NHS spending on private healthcare
This article, behind a paywall, says in down to the pandemic. No, it's down to a decade of underfunding: the NHS was totally unprepared for a pandemic. Despite cash boosts in 2018 and 2019 the NHS budgets rose on average just 1.4% per year, compared to 3.7% average rises since the NHS was established, and an average of over 5% throught the Blair/Brown eras.

Serco hospital porters and cleaners on strike
London hospital staff at Barts, Royal London and Whipps Cross who were outsourced to Serco start a two week strike. The mainly black, Asian and ethnic minority staff are paid 15% less than directly employed staff.

Another Nightingale hospital waste of money
Nightingale units set up in hospital car parks are described by Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer expert at Buckingham University as "an abuse of taxpayers’ money and a complete waste of time". The hubs cost £10 million but only one has received any patients, just 7. He said "What is needed in the NHS ....is staff and trained staff." There are 40,000 nurse vacancies in the English NHS, yet the government lavishes money on private hospitals.

PPE that cost £2.7 billion goes unused
5 billion items of protective gear costing £2,7000,0000 of the NHS budget is either defective or no longer needed.

Challenge to US surgery take-over in court
Operose Health, a UK subsidiary of Centene bought AT Medics, a firm that was set up by 6 medics. It meant that the US giant ran 49 surgeries in London. The merger created the largest private supplier of GP services in the UK. The request for a judicial review is being brought by Anjna Khurana, an NHS patient and Islington councillor. She claims she is one of 375,000 patients across London who were only informed of the takeover of their GP surgeries after the event.

Another £225 million to the private sector
The usual HSJ paywall here but it's the same story. While the publicly-run NHS remains impoverished - there are 40,000 nurse vacancies - the Tory government continues to lavish millions of our NHS budget on the private healthcare sector. Yes the NHS is overstretched owing to Covid but also due to years of underfunding.

Appalling crowding in A&Es
The number of ‘trolley waits’ of more than 12 hours has continued to rise; leaked data suggest there will be more than 12,000 long waits in January, and senior medics warn of ‘appalling crowding’ in emergency departments.

Money spent on private sector: who benefits?
During the Covid crisis, private companies have pocketed millions in furlough payments while billing the NHS for services that we now know weren't fully used.

Covid contracts: anything but transparent
61 Parliamentary Questions were submitted to Ministers seeking details on the cost of private contracts and the number of patients treated. But ministers were "unable to provide details" on the amounts paid to individual providers under the contract.