Nhs

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in classrooms before and saw that they made a difference’. He suggested it was quite a significant study. ‘If you just think it through, with a respiratory disease that is aerosol-transmitted, if you are asymptomatic but wearing a mask, you’re much, much less likely to infect other people.’ The government has now published an ‘Evidence Summary’

Since becoming Health Secretary there has been one big question Sajid Javid cannot answer: how can he justify firing a worker who has recovered from Covid, has antibodies and doesn’t want the vaccine? Javid first did this with unjabbed care home workers and now plans to fire unjabbed NHS doctors. Today he met one of them — and it didn’t go well. Javid’s answer? He didn’t have one During a visit to King’s College Hospital in south London, Javid was on camera talking to NHS staff asking them what they thought about his plans for compulsory vaccination. He presumably expected them to agree. But then along comes Steve James, an intensive care doctor who

Boris Johnson latest Covid press conference was slightly confusing. The Prime Minister spent nearly an hour saying nothing particularly new. He warned that there was ‘considerable pressure’ on the NHS at the moment and unveiled daily priority lateral flow testing for 100,000 essential workers so that key services, including healthcare, don’t seize up due to staff absences. But while he accepted that hospitals were feeling the heat, he also insisted that there was no data suggesting that a lockdown was necessary or helpful. Indeed, he argued:  ‘We have a chance to ride out this Omicron wave without shutting down our country once again. We can keep our schools and our

Throughout the pandemic there have been frequent demands for more investment in the NHS. In October, Rishi Sunak was forced to announce further investment of almost £6 billion  to tackle England’s record NHS waiting list. Between 2010 and 2025, the health budget is expected to have increased by 42 per cent; with NHS England’s resource budget set to rise to £162.6 billion over that period. But is all that money being spent wisely? For new figures from the Department of Health show that, while the public is crying out for frontline services, the number of well-paid NHS managers now run into the thousands. According to health minster Edward Argar there are now some 7,018 managers with total earnings

Boris Johnson promised to ‘fix social care once and for all’ as he became Prime Minister on the steps of No. 10. On the basis of today’s social care white paper, he doesn’t think it’s particularly badly broken. Care minister Gillian Keegan launched the document in the Commons this afternoon, telling MPs that while this set out a 10-year ‘vision’, ‘today’s white paper is an important step on our journey to giving more people the dignified care that we want for our loved ones’. Those words — ‘important step’ — suggest that ministers don’t think this is the sum total of their proposals to fix social care, which is just

The Health and Care Bill is having a predictably stormy passage through parliament, popping up in the Lords next week for its second reading. If you’d paid only cursory attention to its closing stages in the Commons then you might be forgiven for thinking the legislation is largely about reform to social care and privatisation of the NHS. In reality, the social care policy was inserted at the last minute, and it’s only an amendment covering the cap on care costs, while privatisation has become something left-wing politicians like to warn is about to happen regardless of what’s in the bill before them (more on that here). It is not

This is an edited transcript of Professor Chris Whitty’s remarks at today’s Downing Street press conference The existing situation is almost entirely Delta.  In terms of numbers of cases, it is broadly flat. In younger children, there is quite significant transmission at this point in time, and rates are increasing in many parts of the country. At the other end of the spectrum, as a result of the booster programme almost certainly, rates are beginning to drift downwards in people over 60 and particularly people above 70. So we’re seeing an improvement in the group who are most vulnerable.  The numbers going to hospital are gradually decreasing. This is not a

MPs have approved the government’s social care cap in the Commons. But the vote doing so was narrow, and there seem to have been a lot of Conservative MPs either abstaining (which would be a rebellion against a three-line whip) or absent. Some will have been unwell, and ‘slipped’, as it is known, for other reasons. But some may have agreed with the whips that their car was due to break down or a tooth due to need emergency dental work, thus preventing them from voting against this controversial amendment. Others, like Matt Hancock, gave such rousing speeches in its favour that casual observers might have been forgiven for thinking

My patient has sepsis. The window for treatment is short; in less than an hour, he could die. In urgent care, the direct line to ambulance control bypasses 999: it lets the call handler know a doctor requires urgent attention for a sick patient. Ten minutes: no response. I’m on a second phone to central dispatch: what is going on? A critical incident has been called; the service is overwhelmed. Finally, after 15 minutes, the phone answers and help is on its way.  Worryingly, this is far from an isolated incident. Last week, it was reported that an ambulance service sent a taxi to a GP practice in Bristol to collect a

This week’s events have undoubtedly done the government damage. But I suspect that ultimately its fate will be determined by whether its gamble of raising taxes to put more money into the NHS results in much lower waiting lists — or just grumpy taxpayers. Reducing the backlog will require more capacity. So, it is worrying that the Department of Health doesn’t know how many extra doctors and nurses it will need to clear the backlog. The government is currently miles off even its pre-pandemic target of 6,000 extra doctors by 2024. Optimistic numbers suggest there might be 300 more than in 2019, but others think things have gone backwards. If these