Nhs

The whose-fault-is-the-NHS-crisis game has taken some strange twists and turns this week, with the debate bouncing from patients costing the health service £1bn last year to Jeremy Hunt having to apologise to patients for cancelling their non-urgent procedures as a result of the increased pressures on hospitals. Political debate tends to prefer black-and-white and easily identifiable scapegoats, but the health service is too complex for that. Take the missed appointments story. Yes, patients failing to turn up cost the health service a staggering amount. But who are those patients? It turns out that the most likely people to do what the NHS classes as a ‘DNA’ (did not attend) are

Whose fault is the current NHS crisis? Today Jeremy Hunt apologised to patients whose operations have been cancelled as a result of serious pressures on hospitals. There are ‘major incidents’ at 16 hospital trusts, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is warning that patients who do end up in crowded and chaotic emergency departments ‘are much more likely to have a poorer outcome and even die as a result of their experience’. The Health Secretary said the current situation was ‘absolutely not what I want’, while Theresa May argued that ‘the NHS has been better prepared for this winter than ever before’. The government has not met Simon Stevens’

Could cancer break the NHS? This was the provocative title of a debate at the British Museum hosted by The Spectator and sponsored by Philips. Two of the expert panellists suggested that it just might. Others were more optimistic. But all seemed to agree that, for the NHS to survive, bold action was required. First, Neil Mesher, CEO of Philips UK and Ireland (UKI), presented some frightening statistics. One in two people will be diagnosed with cancer – a proportion that is rising because we are living longer. Greater awareness of cancer, too, means that more people are being referred for tests – so much so that the demand on

Memory, neuroscientists tell us, is fallible. It is a dynamic process whereby each time we remember something, it will be changed. Our first memories are probably even less reliable, but I think mine is of Christmas 1953, when I was three. My mother was German and we celebrated Christmas in the German way. An English Christmas is a dull affair in comparison, with presents handed out by underslept parents on a cold and drab Christmas morning, around a tree decorated with electric lights. German Christmas would start on the first Advent Sunday with my mother making a wreath of fir branches and red ribbons, with four red candles. On each

On 12 September, The Spectator hosted a round-table dinner, sponsored by Bupa, to discuss the future of healthcare in Britain, involving MPs and practitioners. This is a summary of the evening’s discussion. We are forever being told that the health and social care system is in crisis thanks to government ‘cuts’. The trouble is that political parties which try to be honest about the rising cost of healthcare, and come up with solutions as to how we will fund it, tend to be given a rough reception – as the Conservatives discovered when they launched their manifesto for this year’s election, which saw their proposals for social care funding damned

At a dinner on Tuesday 26th September at the Spectator’s offices, sponsored by Philips, entrepreneurs, doctors and healthcare experts discussed how new technology could ease pressure on the NHS – and whether the health service was equipped to take advantage of it. Guests included: Naushard Jabir, founder and CEO of Vida, Paul Bate, Director of NHS Services at Babylon, Professor Simon Wessely, President of the Royal Society of Medicine, Helen Whately MP, Dr Claire Novorol, chief medical officer at Ada, Neil Mesher, CEO of Philips UK and Ireland, Sola Adeleke of Aurora Medical Innovation, Nicholas Timmins, senior fellow at the King’s Fund and Dr Jakobsen, chief scientific officer of Immunocore

When I started out as a political journalist, I was always thrown by the word ‘policy’. To most people it sounded so dull and wonky whereas for me, it was – and is – easily the most exciting aspect of politics. How to fix the NHS, tackle poverty, solve the housing crisis, make state schools as good as private schools? This is what Westminster should be about: a battle of ideas. So we’re introducing a forum for this battle: Spectator Briefing, where we’ll seek a variety of voices and go into greater depth than would be suitable for Coffee House. There will be graphs, more links to PDFs and we’ll

For technology manufacturers, healthcare is already big business, and, with an ageing population increasingly comfortable with technologies that would’ve been unthinkable even a decade ago, the opportunities to innovate are only going to increase. The Future Health Index, a global report commissioned by Philips, supports the fact that it is not just the UK’s younger generation that are embracing these technologies. However are these products – from popular or trendy FitBits to state-of-the-art imaging equipment – really going to revolutionise the country’s medical care? And will the NHS require a head to toe change of ethos to accommodate them? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson is joined to discuss all this by

Public health specialist Sir Michael Marmot has blamed ‘the cuts’ for the rise in dementia among the elderly, resulting in a decline in the rising rate of life expectancy. But parroting ‘the cuts’ does nothing to treat the cause. If Sir Michael wants to tackle that problem, the ancients can tell him how. It has to do with lifestyle. Ancient medicine, like ancient Gaul, was divided into three parts: drugs, surgery and lifestyle. This last part permeated every aspect of life. Food and exercise were taken to be the most important, but sleep, sex, bathing, massage, mental activity, and so on — even clothing — could all come into the

The NHS is one year older, yet none the wiser. Having spiralled into perpetual crisis years ago, no one can pretend the gargantuan system is looking great for its age. Its fragile condition has all of us worried – not least because of the millions of lives that are forced to depend on our monopoly health service. The NHS’s woes are thought by some to be the result of some evil right-wing push towards privatisation – and by no means a reason to hold back oodles of praise for the healthcare system. If anything, the health service’s troubles have served as a call-to-arms to defend the status quo. But despite the jabs and digs

Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be doing Richard a favour, but the truth is he cheers me up far more than I do him. I visit because I like him, but as the weeks go by, I’m afraid I’ve also developed a grim curiosity about what it’s like to be in your nineties. Meals-on-wheels, crumbling knees, hernias, cannulas, the way a day dissolves into unintended naps… ‘Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?’ says Richard, as we sit knee to knee. But I’m obsessed, like a tourist taking notes on some awful country they must one

Mrs May promises to amend the Equalities Act to prevent employers from ‘unfairly’ dismissing those with mental disorders. It is a laudable aim, but imagine what would happen if businesses had to keep on a disturbed worker. Imagine what it would be like, not only for the employer, but for the other employees. In her speech on ‘the shared society’ in January, Mrs May pitched into the ‘burning injustice of mental health and inadequate treatment’. In doing so, she praised the ‘tremendous campaigning work by Black Mental Health UK’. Again, this was rash. Mental health is an over-politicised subject, and organisations like Black Mental Health UK help make it so.