18th April 2022

NHS staff: ‘Brutalised and burnt out’
There’s an escalating mental health crisis that has seen hospital staff take more than 8 million days off sick in the past five years. A hospital consultant said ““We brutalised our staff for months on end. Then, not surprisingly, quite a lot of them have left or retired.” The government does nothing about ther staffing crisis.

Staff shortages left NHS vulnerable to Covid pandemic
Capacity in the NHS is about skilled workers and that tap can’t be turned on in an instant. We are reaping the seeds of years of workforce policy and planning failures. So says Anita Charlesworth, director of the Health Foundation.

After 12 Tory years it’s come to this
Volunteers to be used to assist with ambulance emergency call-outs. It comes with ambulance response times at the worst level ever recorded – prompting the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Katherine Henderson, to say lives are being put at risk.

Women in poor areas die earlier than most other countries
Women living in the 10% most deprived parts of England have a lower life expectancy than the average woman in countries such as Colombia (79.8 years), Latvia (79.7 years). Globally, only Mexico has a lower overall life expectancy (77.9 years) than women in the poorest parts of England.

Is Sajid Javid putting political ideology before prevention?
This article identifies government cuts in public health budgets. The public health grant fell by a quarter from 2015 to 2021. It had reduced support grants for local government and thus a range of wider supportive and preventive services and wider determinants of health. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that local authorities in the most deprived areas had been hit hardest.