Health News Blog

Are you listening Streeting?
What a disaster it is to have Streeting as a potential health secretary. He has accused the NHS - who exactly? - of using "every winter crisis... as an excuse to ask for more money" and for Labour to avoid “nostalgia about the NHS". The common sense view comes from senior medics who actually work in the NHS - [its] facing an “existential threat” because of years of underinvestment, serious staff shortages and the demands of the ageing population.

The rational guide to the NHS
Over time, the NHS has been the clear top-performer. "When it is again properly-funded, the NHS will again hold a pre-eminent position. The UK spent the least per capita on healthcare in 2017 compared with all other countries studied".

Crumbling hospitals cause medical delays
Hospitals in England are being hit with disruptions to patients’ care more than 100 times every week because of fires, leaks and problems created by outdated buildings

Government lies and the long legacy of Covid
Michelle Mone and her yacht, Boris Johnson and his parties and Dominic Cummings and the eye test at Barnard Castle – greed, fecklessness and dishonesty.

£9 billion wasted on PPE
£9.9 billion of the £13.6 billion worth of PPE that the government bought between 2020 and 2022 was unusable. Ministers have been accused of throwing away taxpayers’ money “as if it were confetti”.

Hospital pathology outsourcing costs £100 million
Whittington Health Trust is outsourcing its pathology services to a private firm at a cost of £100 million. It claims it will gain greater economies and efficiencies, but at what cost to the service it gives?

I'd rather see a doctor
Following a patient death caused by a misdiagnosis by a physician assistant, Nigel Edwards of the Nuffield Trust says "I'd rather see a doctor".

10 years to clear NHS waiting lists
The Institute of Public Policy research says in a report that even if the next government matched previous rates of improvement, it would take nearly 10 years to recover levels of access in the NHS, such is its state after 13 years of neglect.

New year "storm of pressure" for NHS
A surge in the number of flu and Covid admissions threatens the NHS in January 2024.

Palantir: Is there an opt out?
Confusion reigns. NHS England has not published enough details to know whether patients’ objections will be respected, whether and where it believes they don’t apply, and/or whether the Government will make everyone opt out again.

Ophthalmology risks becoming largely privatised
Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ has said a review needed to look at the entire commissioning process and argued generous tariff rates for cataracts were resulting in some patients with very mild cataracts getting surgery at the expense of other patients going blind, which he said was just wrong.

Palantir offices shut down
Hundreds of health workers have shut down the London HQ of Palantir in protest at the awarding of NHS contracts to a company complicit in Israel's 'ongoing genocide in Gaza'.

"Going to be  a terrible winter"
The warning signs were clear: the NHS was starting to slide into another winter crisis. So observed a Unison branch chair and paramedic for nearly four decades. Sunak has reneged on promises to slash long waiting times with a promise of thousands more beds, 800 new ambulances and an expansion of community care backed by a dedicated fund of £1 billion.

Private equity profiteering on care homes
Close to one in four places in a children’s care home in England now ultimately have the involvement of an investment company. One private equity group had pre-tax profits last year of £27.7 million.

Mone and the morals of the super rich
Here's a number of readers' letters on the PPE Michelle Mone scandal. "If Michelle Mone thinks it’s not a crime to lie to the press, then in that spirit, I’d like to say what a warm and wonderful human being she is." Gove has said he's cooperating with the inquiry.