Nhs

What would you say if a powerful cyclists’ pressure group ganged up on the NHS and lobbied it to provide free cycle helmets to anyone who asked for one, accusing it of having on its hands the blood of every helmet-less cyclist who died while the NHS tried to spurn the demand? I think I can guess the answer in the case of most readers: shove off and buy your own helmets. Why, then, does it become such a different matter when the National Aids Trust demands that the NHS provide a free supply of a drug known as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP, to people who want to have unprotected

When your mind suddenly goes wonky, you may be the one person who doesn’t realise that there is something wrong with it. That’s what happened a month ago when I was on a country holiday in Tuscany with my wife. It was lovely weather, and lunch had been laid out of doors. I had cooked a sea bass and was feeling rather pleased with myself. We were both happy, and things could hardly have been better. But everything began to go wrong when my wife decided to ask if I could pass her a knife. A knife? I didn’t know what a knife was. I had never heard of such

The junior doctors strike will be remembered not only as the first time in NHS history that a complete walk out took place, but also for its viciousness. Both the British Medical Association and the Government can share their blame in this. Jeremy Hunt’s threat to ‘impose’ contracts on junior doctors was unhelpful in its forcefulness, even if his frustration was understandable. Whilst the rhetoric used by the BMA has also scarcely painted the association in a good light. Junior doctors may have had their concerns about patient safety but this was also a dispute about pay and to suggest otherwise was disingenuous. It seems, at last however, that an

A deal has been reached between the government and the BMA on the new junior doctors contract. The deal now needs to be approved by a BMA ballot. Details of the deal are still emerging, but I understand that rather than junior doctors working the 11 Saturdays a year that the government wanted them to, they will now work 6 weekends a year. The marginal cost for a hospital of employing a junior doctor will fall by roughly a third if this deal goes through. The government has given some ground elsewhere. Doctors returning from maternity leave will be entitled to catch up on the skills training that they have

Jeremy Hunt has not done himself any favours in the past with his comments about junior doctors. But today – the first time junior doctors have ever walked out without providing emergency cover – was the time for sounding conciliatory. The Health Secretary said it was a ‘very, very bleak day for the NHS’. Hunt went on to add that: ‘The reason this has happened is because the Government has been unable to negotiate sensibly and reasonably with the BMA over a manifesto pledge’. His emphasis on the Conservative’s ‘manifesto pledge’ is a clear part of the Health Secretary’s tactics to win over the public and Hunt repeated his focus

In the 1920s, the anthropologist Margaret Mead studied the people of New Guinea. She noticed that they hunted birds and squirrels but not flying squirrels. The tribesmen explained that they didn’t like flying squirrels: a thing should be either a bird or a squirrel. They wanted nothing to do with the dirty things. And while New Guineans of the 1920s were not leaders of scientific inquiry, Mead concluded that they were quite unstressed at work. Bear with me, because I think the flying squirrel may just be the answer to the stress epidemic that is killing us. Apparently, we’re dying of work-related stress. The media, psychologists and union leaders say

When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence by a man I shall call Anton. We’d gone, my husband and I, for a 20-week scan at our local hospital. Anton was our designated sonographer; we arrived in his room bright-eyed and anxious, as even elderly first-time parents are. We looked to Anton for reassurance, but Anton looked only at his assistant, a sulky 19-year-old sexpot from Romania. The sexpot tried seven times to dig into the vein in my right arm, then began on the left. ‘Don’t worry, good practice, try again,’ said Anton to her, kindly. ‘No,

There’s some journalistic research you’d really never do by choice. Spending four days in an NHS hospital with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, for example. Unfortunately it was out of my hands. I fell off a horse, one thing led to another, and suddenly there I was, lying in what I imagine is a reasonably typical NHS ward being tended by all those multi-ethnic nurses and hard-pressed doctors you read about in the newspapers but rarely encounter yourself because in order to do so you have to be quite seriously ill. So: what have I learned? First, that it’s not as bad as you’ve long feared, especially not for anyone hardened