Nhs

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

David Cameron was grilled today on plans for a ‘7-day NHS’. This is his attempt to iron out a slight kink in the NHS schedules. The trouble is that although our heroic doctors and nurses keep regular hours our deadly diseases are hopelessly unpredictable and like to smite us down whenever they feel a bit grim and reaperish. Perhaps we should write to them about it. In practice this means that NHS efficiency varies widely over the ‘7-day cycle’ or ‘week’ as it’s known. Get ill on a Tuesday and you’ll probably be at a party on Friday. Get ill on a Saturday and you’ll probably be at a funeral

The BMA needs to think carefully about its next steps. In recent weeks, it has become abundantly clear that there is more to this than just the junior doctors’ contract, or indeed the rate of pay for Saturday daytime work. The union can walk away with the deals brokered by Sir David Dalton – which include major concessions on pay and hours – and start to work with the NHS on the wider issue of morale. Or it can continue to do its part to make junior doctors feel worse. Only one of these options will help the NHS meet the very real challenge that it faces. Sadly, peacemakers tend not to prosper within the

A few months ago, paramedics were on the brink of industrial action. They had legitimate grievances. Ambulance services were being run down, their staffing levels were dangerously thin — and the mismanagement (much of it exposed by Mary Wakefield in The Spectator) was horrendous. But in the end they stepped back from the brink — for good reason. It went against their nature to endanger lives, and in addition it would have been a tactical mistake. If a single patient died as a result of the strike, paramedics would have lost public sympathy. Should a nationalised health service really use the unwell as a bargaining chip? English doctors have not

This is a bleak day for the NHS. The doctors strike has gone ahead and some 3,000 operations have been cancelled. Talks broke down last night, and the British Medical Association has shown it is quite prepared to put patients in the firing line in its dispute over a deal that would mean a pay rise, not a pay cut, for 99 per cent of doctors. From 8am this morning, only emergency care will be provided. Treatment for that once-virulent condition, the British disease of strikes, has largely been successful. The number of working days lost to industrial action in the first ten months of last year was the second-lowest

I’ve never understood the phrase ‘died peacefully’. Two weeks ago I watched my mother die, in the very same NHS hospital where I watched my father die almost ten years earlier. There was nothing peaceful about it, at least from my unwanted ringside seat. The end — acute pneumonia providing the final nail in a soon-to-be purchased coffin — was painfully slow. It dragged on and on and on. She struggled for her last breaths and appeared distressed, confused and frightened to the end. The last time I had been to St Helier hospital in south London was September 2005, as my father slowly slipped away. Naturally the memories came

Treatment for that once-virulent condition, the British disease of strikes, has largely been successful. The number of working days lost to industrial action in the first ten months of last year was the second-lowest since records began. Pay and conditions have been relentlessly improving. Since the Winter of Discontent in 1979, the average worker’s disposable income has almost doubled. And no thanks to pressure from trade unions: the steady progress comes from the transformative effects of an open economy and a free market. In the 1970s and early 1980, it was miners, steel workers, railwaymen, bin men, and British Leyland car workers who earned the worst reputations for trade union