Health News Blog

NHS Bill: MP tells the truth
In a Westminster Hall debate MP Richard Burgon spells out the real issues on the new NHS Bill - care limited by capped finance, leading to a privatised service dictated by corporate power and health service given by deregulated, i.e. poorly trained, carers.

Johnson's NI tax rise swallowed up by NHS
Such is the desperate state of the NHS with a decade under-funding that the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ prediction comes amid warnings from NHS leaders that the government’s planned boost to the service’s budget “falls far short of what is needed".

Major services 'fragile and challenged'
This behind a paywall, but in essence a report on health services in Sussex stating the majority of planned care across the Sussex acute providers is in a 'fragile and challenged' state. A comment at the bottom says it's true in every system in the country.

Asylum-seeker given a £100K NHS bill
Simba Mujakachi has lived in the UK since childhood but isn't permitted NHS care under the hostile environment rules. He wasn't allowed a cheap drug for his blood pressure, had a stroke resulting in emergency treatment and got this huge bill from a Sheffield NHS trust.

“Tax the wealthy to pay for social care”
TUC leader Francis O’Grady tells us “seven in 10 social care staff earn less than £10 an hour and one in four are employed on zero-hours contracts”. This is a moral and political outrage, taxing those most able to pay for social care and not young low paid workers IS morally and politically right.

Looming staffing crisis in social care
There’s a pay wall to this article but its story is that a significant numbers of social care workers will leave if, as is planned, they are required to be vaccinated. There’s already a shortage of staff but a crisis looms with many leaving the industry.

A million have opted out: data grab is on hold
More than a million patients have opted out of allowing their GP data to be used in the new General Practice Data for Planning and Research scheme. The deadline was first delayed until September; not their having a “listening exercise”.

Integrated Care: another Tory top-down reorganisation
Following Lansley’s privatising 2012 Health and Social Care Act the Conservative government is imposing another top-down reorganisation, euphemistically labelled “Integrated Care”. The real issues facing the NHS are understaffing, underfunding, and privatisation. The Bill will do nothing for the first two of these and will accelerate privatisation.

Private ambulance firm kicked out on NHS
This HSJ article has a pay wall, but in essence, the Care Quality Commission have “deregistered” Keighley-based KFA Medical. It provided patient transport services to Airedale General Hospital and the Royal Bolton Hospital, badly. The litany of CQC reported problems included dirty ambulances, poor basic training and doubts over management skills.

Any hospital building project now a “new hospital”
Another HSJ article with a pay wall but so laughable that it has to be reported. To support the now infamous Johnson lies, we now have an instruction in a government communication ‘playbook’ that any refurbishment should be described in government reports as ‘a new hospital’.

Tory donor and PCR tests scandal
Dodgy PCR tests offered by 1Rapid Clinics happens to be owned by Conservative donor Dr Ashraf Chohan. There's a trail of unhappy holidaymakers complaining that the testing kits, or the results from those kits, often failed to arrive as promised.
Cameron lobbied for private contracts
David Cameron met with the UK’s vaccine minister less than two months before the UK arm of Illumina Inc, which pays him for his advice, won £870,000-worth of public contracts. Cameron has claimed that his role at the company is simply to promote the benefits of genome sequencing.

GP surgeries 'at breaking point'
The Royal College of GPs has warned that general practice clinics is cracking under the pressure of unsustainable workloads unless the government ramps up the recruitment of medical staff and takes steps to reduce burnout.

Nurses pay falls 7% even after pay offer
Figures produced by the TUC show that NHS workers pay will have dropped by over 7% in real terms in just over a decade, even after factoring in the 3% rise offered last week.

NHS workers "Do more for less"
Is £26000 a good enough wage? Nurse Niaomi Gordon explains why it isn't. They are risking their lives, there are 100,000 vacancies in the NHS, largely left unfilled owing to underfunding causing excessive workload.

Test and Trace civil servants paid more than £200,000
Department of Health and Social Care officers are paid handsomely for their work on our "world-beating" Test and Trace system. This isn't included in the £37 billion paid to private companies like Serco.

Sage scientist "accused ministers of allowing infections to rip"
After the remaining Covid restrictions were eased, Professor Robert West said rhetoric about caution is ‘a way of putting blame on public'. He stated the government was allowing infections to rip through the younger population in an effort to bolster levels of immunity before the NHS faces winter pressures.

GP surgeries are rejecting migrants
A survey reveals that more than two-thirds of the GPs they contacted rejected attempts to register without proof of address, identification, or legal immigration status.

Councils state their conditions for ICS
There's a paywall here, but local authorities in Cheshire and Merseyside have written to their ICS stating, amongst other points, that NHS spending should be determined in partnership with local government and local access to the “full range of NHS services” should be guaranteed to all communities. I suspect the ICS can't guarantee these.

Well respected GP campaigner dies
Politicians and campaigners lead tributes to Dr Kailash Chand. "The staunchest supporters of our national health service", "fearless defender of our NHS campaigning against privatisation", "the most committed and passionate NHS campaigner that I have ever met."