Health News Blog

Shortage of staff biggest threat to backlog
Health Foundation: "The NHS in England has 94,000 vacancies, including for 9,691 doctors and 38,952 nurses. Personnel shortages are the biggest threat to the NHS’s quest to tackle the backlog."

Cancer patients missing out on crucial care
This HSJ article is behind a paywall, but in essence it's the shortage of trained nurses that is the cause. Health outcomes and in some cases survival chances are worse. Excessive workloads mean many nurses have no time for patients and their families to ask important questions or raise concern.

NHS Bill: absence of informed debate
An excellent briefing by KONP , who say "We have been shocked at the absence of informed debate and opposition from politicians to a Bill that will undermine public control and provision of the NHS as a national health service aiming to provide comprehensive, universal treatment and care in response to need..."

NHS Bill: deceit behind secondary legislation
NHS England's Interim Guidance contains fundamental changes that ought to be part of parliamentary and media consideration. "Why does the guidance not specify that “providers” means “NHS providers”? Probably because “System partners” is code for private companies, charities and voluntary sector organisations".

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.