Nhs

I am 45. That means I’m old enough to have been writing about politics at a time when political attacks on ‘NHS managers’ were a routine part of political debate and media coverage, standing alongside ‘yobs’ and ‘asylum-seekers’ as the nation’s villains. It’s also old enough to get me a Covid-19 vaccine, injected into my arm on Saturday morning at a GP surgery in south London by a student doctor from a nearby teaching hospital. Watching the performance of the vaccine centre, doling out hundreds of vaccines each hour, I was reminded of all those promises from all those politicians about getting rid of fat cat NHS managers. The current

The Government in the person of Rishi Sunak won a surprisingly positive public response to what was essentially a tax-raising Budget this week. Within 24 hours though, the same government had spectacularly lost the PR contest by recommending a 1 per cent pay rise for NHS staff across the board. The outcry was universal: mean, measly, an insult, a slap in the face, not a way to treat ‘our heroes’ – or, more personally, those who saved the Prime Minister’s life. The rise – and it is currently just a recommendation to the NHS pay review body – is indeed a mistake. In fact, it is a double mistake, but

Soon, as the rates of coronavirus deaths and infections plummet, we’re likely to focus more on those who suffer what is being called ‘long Covid’ — yet the truth is we know very little about what precisely it is. Long Covid began as a quiet murmur in the background: anecdotal stories about symptoms which extended beyond the predicted 14-day recovery time. There’s no agreed definition, so it’s hard to say how many sufferers there are, but a survey from the Office for National Statistics suggests it affects as many as one in ten of those who have had the virus. As the second wave retreats, the number of people left

As an epidemiologist and doctor who volunteered to return to the frontline in both waves, I have seen first hand the death and suffering from Covid. And, also, the knock-on effects on those affected by cancelled services. Deciding when to end lockdown is, of course, a difficult decision, but I now fear the costs of lockdown will soon start beginning to outweigh the benefits. There is no doubt that Covid-19 has the capability to rapidly overwhelm our healthcare system and cause unprecedented casualties. Indeed, what has transpired over the last year suggests that Neil Ferguson’s figure – that the virus was capable of taking 500,000 lives – looks fairly accurate.

On Saturday the government hit its target of administering a first vaccine dose to 15 million of the highest-risk groups for Covid 19. By now, everyone over the age of 70, all healthcare workers and vulnerable groups should have been offered a vaccine. It is an impressive achievement which stands in contrast to many of the other things that have gone wrong over the past year. But there is a rather large fly sitting in the ointment. While 90 per cent of eligible members of the general public have turned up for their appointments (97 per cent in the over-80s), the same is true of only 80 per cent of

Captain Sir Tom Moore was a lovely man and an inspiration to centenarians everywhere. Actually, forget centenarians; if the rest of us could be so chipper and nicely turned out at half his age, we’d be doing well. I was oddly moved to hear of his death, though not, I fear, to the point of turning out at my window to applaud. But then I gave the communal pot banging a miss for the NHS during lockdown too, so that’s nothing new. I’m not convinced Boris Johnson is right, though, when he says Captain Tom deserves a statue. After all, he was a modest man, Sir Tom; I’m not sure he

The Care Quality Commission has released its reports on the gender identity services offered by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. They make for grim reading. The CQC describes an NHS facility that — until last month — put vulnerable children on a pathway to the use of untested medicines and life-changing interventions, sometimes without keeping proper records proving consent for treatment or demonstrating the reasons for that treatment. An NHS service where staff were afraid to raise concerns about procedure and practice for fear of ‘retribution’ from their employers. An NHS service that failed to ask fundamental questions about the growing number of vulnerable children being presented for

I have now observed a Covid-19 vaccination hub from both sides. As a patient waiting outside in a three-hour queue, much of it in the rain, I wondered why everything was moving so slowly. As a volunteer doctor working on the inside, I saw numerous good-hearted colleagues trying their hardest, bursting a gut to make the system work. Why the difference? I have concluded that the NHS approach to patient safety is a very significant contributor to vaccination delays. There has been national publicity around the mandatory training for potential volunteers before they can start work, which has included ‘diversity’ and ‘counter-extremism’ training. A friend who is a recently retired

It is easy to be offended by the idea of the super-rich trying to buy their place in the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine ahead of your granny, and easy to feel a warm glow of satisfaction that they are being rebuffed – all supplies are being held on such a tight rein by the NHS that private clinics can’t get a look in. But would it really be such a bad idea if a handful of very wealthy individuals were allowed to have the vaccine ahead of schedule and raise some very useful cash for the NHS in the process? If we are going to vaccinate our way out