Nhs

The NHS plans to vaccinate everyone who wants a jab by early April, according to leaked documents seen by the Health Service Journal. This marks a shift in strategy from the government’s previous plan to only vaccinate the vulnerable. If successful, it would mean that all social distancing measures could be ended in April. The documents operate on a 75 per cent take-up rate for the vaccine among the general population, which seems a touch high given polling on the subject. It assumes that the NHS would be vaccinating 4.5 million people per week and for both the Oxford and Pfizer vaccines people would need to take two doses, 28 days

Cancelled procedures Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’ and ignored Sage’s call for a second national lockdown. Sam Carlisle (‘No respite’, 7 November) illustrates why this would have been a mistake. Sam reminds us that ‘half of community paediatricians were deployed to acute services’ during the pandemic’s first wave. Many other specialists were similarly redeployed. That the NHS was not overwhelmed in the first wave was precisely because most routine work stopped and staff were redeployed en masse to treat Covid-19 patients. Leaving projections aside, there were in fact 13,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital on Sunday 8 November.

The start of lockdown The earliest known use of ‘lockdown’ in its current sense was in a 1973 story in the Fresno Bee, a Californian newspaper, referring to prisoners being kept in their cells after a knife attack. Despite apparently giving the world the concept, not all Fresno locals seemed happy to be placed in lockdown in April. A protest in May resulted in a fight between protestors and the president of the city council. Bed cover How full of Covid patients are hospitals? Hospitals with more than 200 Covid patients (data for 27 October): —Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: 450 out of 1,595 beds — Sheffield Teaching Hospitals

How much should we pay to save life? The question is often viewed as distasteful: you can’t put a price on human life. But resources are finite. Even if the only purpose of life was to prolong it for as long as possible, there would be limits to healthcare affordability. So if resources are limited, how can their application be made fairly? And how can this logic be applied in a pandemic? One element when establishing a fair method is to consider life years saved rather than lives saved. This recognises that someone of my age (55), who has already enjoyed two-thirds of his likely life span, should be a

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust carries out some of the most complex and contentious clinical work in the NHS. It deals with children and young people who are experiencing discomfort over their gender identity, but is it raising patient safety concerns? Some of the children it sees go on to change their legal gender. Some receive physical treatment in the form of puberty-blocking medications. Some go on to have further treatments including cross-sex hormones and surgery. The service, which is heavily over-subscribed, is a divisive one. A number say it offers vital, even life-changing care to children in great distress and

When the media have gone large on the conclusions of an overpoweringly tedious report, one of the biggest favours a columnist can do for a readership is to read the source. Friends, you owe me. I will expect flowers and chocolate. For I have located Public Health England’s ‘Beyond the Data: Understanding the impact of Covid-19 on BAME communities’ and ploughed through the whole bloody thing. This is the report that produced headlines like the Guardian’s ‘Historical racism may be behind England’s higher BAME Covid-19 rate’. Channel 4 News hit the same black-and-brown-patients-are-dying-of-racism note, which conveniently chimes with the current hair-shirtery of Black Lives Matter. A bit too conveniently, I