Nhs

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Sunak’s NHS position is on life support

Rishi Sunak is still refusing to say that the NHS is ‘in crisis’. He’s held meetings on ‘NHS recovery’ this weekend, and will have been told in no uncertain terms by healthcare leaders that this is a crisis, probably the worst one the health service has faced in its history. He told Laura Kuenssberg in an interview broadcast this morning that ‘the NHS is under pressure’, and there were ‘unacceptable delays’ in emergency care, but would not accept the ‘crisis’ word. This is because, as I’ve said before,  it is hard for the Tories to blame anyone else for said crisis at this stage of the political cycle.  The line

Thursday

Steerpike

Doncaster surgery’s Christmas gaffe leaves locals gasping

These days it seems that nobody can ever get through to their doctors’ practice. But one GP surgery left their patients wishing that was still the case this week after accidentally texting them to inform that they had aggressive lung cancer – instead of wishing them a merry Christmas. Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster sent the text message to residents registered with the surgery on Friday 23 December. Distraught locals said they received an initial text informing them that they had an ‘aggressive lung cancer with metastases’, a type of secondary malignant growth. The text even directed patients to fill out a form for people with terminal diseases to claim

Saturday

Lucy Dunn

Volunteers won’t save the NHS this winter

Workers are balloting for industrial action, attending mass demonstrations and preparing to strike. A ferocious tug-o’-war between trade unions and employers is playing out across the country. Though striking RMT members have been accused of ‘ruining Christmas’, the country’s greatest fears should be reserved for the NHS, which will see ambulance workers and nurses walk out before January, when junior doctors in England cast their vote on industrial action. Is there a solution? A leaked briefing from the Department of Health and Social Care suggests that the government believes volunteers could act as a buffer while healthcare staff take action this winter.  The 31-page report reveals that NHS performance is

Wednesday

The Spectator

Has the pandemic made us appreciate nature more?

Out to grass If Liz Truss is forced out of office (and doesn’t also resign her parliamentary seat as Tony Blair did on resigning as prime minister), there will be three ex-PMs sitting on the backbenches of the Commons. When was the last time this happened? — Between Jim Callaghan’s defeat in the 1979 general election and Harold Wilson’s retirement from the Commons four years later, Callaghan, Wilson and Edward Heath were all still in parliament. As for the number of living ex-PMs, we are already at a modern record, with Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major. Prior to Johnson’s departure from office,

The Spectator

Letters: The case for legalising cannabis

Paying the price Sir: Lionel Shriver’s piece about university standards rang true to me (‘University is supposed to be hard’, 15 October). When I, then working for a distinctly moth-eaten British university, visited a very famous private college in Massachusetts in 1985, I expressed my envy of his luxurious surroundings to a professor of English. His reply was: ‘Don’t envy us. You have something we don’t have. It’s called standards.’ He went on to say that he had just been warned about his behaviour as he had given a ‘very generous’ B minus for an essay by an ‘idle, insolent, profoundly ignorant pig of a student’, who complained about the

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why can’t I give blood?

I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the nation are scrambled, Westminster’s insane, of course the country’s bleeding out. But at least, I thought, I can help a bit. I’ve given blood in the past and I enjoy it. There’s the feeling of warmth and purpose, and biscuits. I’d never fork out for a packet of custard creams, but like most English women and men I’m a sucker for one or two free on a saucer in a medical setting. Our blood donor scheme is actually all-round cheery. Each country has its own circulatory system, a flow out

Thursday

The Spectator

Liz Truss can’t ignore the issue of NHS reform

It’s hard to think of any Prime Minister who has entered office surrounded by such low expectations. Liz Truss was backed by just over half of Conservative party members and secured barely an eighth of MPs in the first ballot. Her critics dismiss her as a lightweight, wholly unsuited to tackling the problems now facing the country. The presumption is not just for trouble, but calamity: the fastest drop in living standards in living memory, followed by prolonged recession and worse. So if Truss manages to send inflation into reverse and makes a noticeable cut to taxes by Easter, it will be seen as quite an achievement. She has also

Thursday

Rod Liddle

It’s time for some home truths, Rishi

I wonder how many people in the country are bitterly disappointed that Liz Truss pulled out of her exciting one-to-one interview with Nick Robinson? I can think of only two. First, of course, Nick Robinson. Nick was very much looking forward to it. His ideal assignment would be to interview himself for an entire afternoon, but failing that, Liz Truss would do just fine. The other, of course, is Rishi Sunak, who must have been hoping that Liz would dig herself another hole and carry on digging until she emerged somewhere near Maruia Springs, say, in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. I suppose it is just about possible that some of

Monday

Sam Leith

We still love our failing NHS

A new poll about the NHS, the Sunday Times tells us, has discovered ‘a decline in support’ for the National Health Service. The story spoke of ‘wide dissatisfaction about the state of the health service’, under the headline: ‘Britain falls out of love with the NHS’. The figures from the poll itself tell a slightly different story. The headline finding was that three people in five are now not confident that they would receive timely treatment were they to fall ill tomorrow. But these three people in five aren’t necessarily saying they’ve ceased to approve of the NHS. It seems to me that they are simply affirming what they’ve read

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: How to reform the GMC

Overhaul the GMC Sir: Max Pemberton’s cogent criticism of the GMC (‘Unfit for purpose’, 20 August). is one of the more nuanced and on the nose of those that I have read. A client of mine was reprimanded and subjected to a fitness-to-practise investigation after an attempted suicide following a financial crisis. The experience worsened his mental health, which then prolonged the investigation. Other clients have been forced to sell their homes or relocate. Some initial steps I implore the GMC to take include limiting the length of investigations, improving mental health reporting, providing more support for doctors about fitness-to-practise issues, and overhauling how evidence is handled. Deepika Raino Director

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

A four-way race between poet, actor, video artist and sound engineer: Edinburgh Festival’s Burn reviewed

In a new hour-long monologue, Burn, Alan Cumming examines the life and work of Robert Burns. The biographical material is drawn from Burns’s letters, and the poems are read out in snatches. You won’t learn much except that Burns was a poor farmer who later worked as a taxman. To represent his many flings with women, a few high-heeled shoes are dangled on strings above the stage but this looks strangely cheap given that huge sums have been lavished on graphic imagery projected onto a big screen at the rear. Flashing lights and surges of music add to the sense of distraction. Cumming’s performance centres on dance, which looks like

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Finally, some justice for the infected blood scandal’s victims

Why has the greatest patient scandal in the history of the NHS rumbled on for so long before its victims even start to see justice? It shouldn’t have taken 40 years for there to be an answer Today the government awarded £100,000 in interim compensation to around 4,000 survivors of the contaminated blood scandal, as recommended by Sir Robert Francis, who published a report on the matter earlier this year. They have been fighting for 40 years for justice that, as yet, does not cover the bereaved parents and children of those who were infected with HIV and Hepatitis C when they were given dirty blood products for their haemophilia

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The Tavistock is a national health scandal

The race isn’t run Sir: Bravo Fiona Unwin (‘Rooting for Rishi’, 6 August) for the best piece I have read on the grassroots take on the Conservative party’s leadership election. Having attended several such hustings both this time and over the years, this one does remind me of 2005: David Davis vs David Cameron. Lots of career-focused senior MPs backing an early front-runner, and then quiet reflection from the life-experienced sensible grassroots membership. Few predicted the 2005 winner until that electric party conference speech. This time, with dozens of events like the one the vice-president of West Suffolk describes, the typical Spectator reader rather than the Westminster hack will select

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

How ‘kindness’ became big business

In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children to cut off their genitals; the fact that Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, thinks it deeply wrong to talk them out of it; freak shakes; Heinz ‘pink’ sauce; gannets dead all down the North Sea coast; swearing six-year-olds still in nappies (says my teacher friend in the North-East); risking nuclear war over Ukraine; the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Energy bills up, NHS waiting lists down and hosepipes off

Home Energy bills will be £4,266 for a typical household by January, according to the consultancy Cornwall Insight, which had put the sum at £3,616 only a week earlier. Ofgem had decided since then to shorten the period over which suppliers can recover their costs. Gordon Brown, prime minister 2007-10, declared that Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, competitors to succeed him, must hold an emergency Budget to deal with the ‘financial timebomb’ of energy prices. ‘If they do not,’ he said, ‘parliament should be recalled to force them to do so.’ Liz Truss, in an interview with the Financial Times, said she would help

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Good riddance to the Tavistock

Most push notifications that pop up on my tablet concern impending catastrophe. But last week, one newsflash made my day. Glory hallelujah, the NHS is closing the Tavistock. A clatter of tattletales have warned since 2005 that the UK’s only clinic for minors confused about which sex they are – having been encouraged to be confused by British media and their own teachers – was fast-tracking children into often irreversible treatments in the service of ideologically driven ‘gender affirmation’. At last the Cass report has determined that the clinic’s practices are unsafe. The Tavistock will close by the spring, which by my calculation is seven months too late – if

Thursday

James Kirkup

Why the Tavistock clinic had to be shut down

There are many reasons why what is sometimes crudely called ‘the trans issue’ is important. One is the political failure that left the legitimate views of many women (and men) ignored by decision-making individuals and bodies, who instead prioritised the views of interest groups and campaigners. Another is the multiple failures of governance that have seen numerous public bodies fail to deal properly and responsibly with questions of real public interest, because of their enthusiasm to follow the subjective agenda of interest groups rather than amass and act on objective evidence. Simply put, organisations that are supposed to make decisions on the basis of facts have sometimes chosen to proceed

Fiona Mountford

The small NHS failings that let down patients like my mother

I would be the first to admit that the NHS has done a lot for my mother this year. It gave her the emergency blood transfusion that undoubtedly saved her life, followed by several iron infusions and umpteen scans and tests. It has treated a series of infected leg ulcers and provided consultations with senior medical figures and countless more outpatient appointments. It has supplied her with swanky new hearing aids and nursed her through Covid. During her four months in hospital, in two separate stays of nine and seven weeks, it came up with three meals a day, not all of them involving ravioli, mash and gravy, and a

Tuesday

Tim Knox

How to fix the NHS

That the NHS is in intensive care appears to be beyond doubt. The health service in England needs 12,000 doctors and 50,000 nurses and midwives, and waiting lists are expected to rise to 9.2 million by March 2024. The question now is what to do. It’s a question that has been asked before, and the answers have been poor. One more heave at reform, a task force here, a task force there, another few billion all over the place and all will be well, so the defenders of the NHS claim. What they overlook, however, is that there have been more than a dozen major reform programmes over the past

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Can Rishi Sunak heal the NHS?

Rishi Sunak’s big pitch this weekend is to grip the NHS waiting list crisis. It makes political sense, given the terrifying size of these lists now, with some trusts declaring their waits ‘unmanageable’. By the time of the next election, the crisis in the NHS is going to seem monstrous. Ethical concerns tend to end up fading whenever a government has failed to do the long-term planning it could have done The former chancellor is worried that the surge in people seeking private treatment is ‘privatisation by the back door’. James and I discuss the wider context of this on our latest Coffee House Shots podcast, agreeing that if people