Nhs

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Excl: NHS tries to ditch the focus on ‘normal births’ after scandal

It’s only been two weeks since the Ockenden report on the maternity scandal at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust came out. That report criticised – among many other things – a focus on ‘normal birth’ and a low Caesarean section rate which had harmed some of the mothers and babies in the cases it had investigated. Job adverts give the impression that some sections of the NHS aren’t prepared to learn the lessons from Ockenden Since then, though, there have still been job adverts going out from other NHS trusts for midwives who are interested in ‘normality’ – the common term for a vaginal delivery, preferably without instrumental

Thursday

The Spectator

What happened to Tory radicalism?

Whatever advantages money may have brought Rishi Sunak as he rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, his wealth has now become a serious hindrance to his career. Whatever decisions he takes, everything is seen through the prism of his personal financial situation. If he rejects demands for greater public spending, he will be accused of throwing the poor to the lions. If he raises taxes, he will be accused of failing to understand how ordinary people are struggling. If he cuts them, he will be accused of pandering to his rich friends. Even acts of private generosity by Sunak seem to arouse suspicion when made public. This week it

Friday

Kate Andrews

Normal people are paying the price for NHS failures

Most people don’t need reminding about the cost-of-living crunch: food, petrol, bills and transport all provide a daily reminder that prices are going up. But today’s energy price cap rise – lifting by almost £700 – provides a headline example of the increasing costs of essential goods.. Alongside it, the National Insurance hike (a 2.5 percentage point rise split between employers and employees) and an average council tax rise of 3.5 per cent both kick in too. But what about the essential services that are supposedly ‘free’? It seems these are getting expensive too. This week the Private Healthcare Information Network released its data on the number of NHS patients

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

The NHS failing mothers is nothing new

Can Sajid Javid really say, as he did this afternoon in the Commons, that the government is taking action to ensure ‘that no families have to go through the same pain’ experienced by those affected by the biggest maternity scandal in the history of the NHS? The Ockenden inquiry into the maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust published its final report today, concluding that ‘repeated’ failures in care may have led to the deaths of more than 200 babies, and of nine mothers. The individual stories of stillborn babies, infants severely and sometimes fatally harmed, and women’s pain being dismissed are deeply distressing. What is worse

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are we falling out of love with the NHS?

Clap for carers now feels like ancient history. Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest since 1997, according to a new study out today. The British Social Attitudes Survey finds overall satisfaction with the health service at just 36 per cent, a record-breaking fall of 17 points since 2020. People often relate to the health service through GPs and their experience of A&E. The latter has experienced a record-breaking 15 point fall, now at 39 per cent satisfaction, its lowest level since the BSA started asking questions about A&E in 1999. It’s worth remembering that in 1997, when public satisfaction with the NHS as a whole was at just 34

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Time is running out for the Tories to meet their promises

Will the Conservatives have much evidence that they’ve helped the country recover from the pandemic by the next election? Even though all the indications are that the party will go for a later poll in 2024, they still do not have much time to fix the big holes that have gaped wider as a result of Covid. In many cases, such as the NHS backlog, the holes were already there before the pandemic, which makes them even harder to close up. Education is another policy area where the rhetoric and time left to fulfil it just don’t seem to match up. This morning I asked Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi on

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Could the private sector help fix the NHS backlog?

The Conservative plan to tackle the NHS backlog has, so far, run roughly along the lines of the New Labour approach to the hefty waiting lists in the health service at the turn of the century. More money, more flexibility when using the private sector and greater ‘patient choice’ (which in this context translates as patients who’ve been waiting a very long time being able to get treatment in another part of the country where waiting lists aren’t quite so bad). So far, the main difference is that ministers are just shouting a bit less at hospitals (though GPs might argue they are bearing the brunt this time instead) than

Monday

Steerpike

Saj’s struggling NHS revolution

Sajid Javid was something of a breath of fresh air when he was appointed as Health Secretary last June. Gone was the libidinous, lockdown-loving Matt Hancock; in came the Thatcherite free-marketeer promising a ‘return to normalcy.’ Since then, some of the shine has come off the Saj. First, there was the debacle over Covid passes at Christmas. And now the Health Secretary faces the perennial problem which faced his predecessors: how to pay for a creaking health service with an ageing population? In his first major policy speech last week, Javid spoke candidly to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). He warned that the NHS is on an ‘unsustainable financial trajectory’ and urged new methods to ‘reduce

Sunday

Professor Gordon Wishart

Britain is facing a cancer care timebomb

As many as 100,000 patients had a cancer that was missed, or had their diagnoses or treatments delayed during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. That’s the shocking finding of a recent study by the Institute of Cancer Policy at King’s College London. The experts conclude that some patients will already have died, many still haven’t been diagnosed and others will already have a more advanced cancer as a result of the delays. And it is likely this figure of 100,000 will continue to rise as more data from 2021 and early 2022 is analysed. In other words, there could not be a more important time to fix cancer care

Friday

James Kirkup

The problem with the UK’s transgender clinic

This is not a good time to be a girl. Research from Steer Education last month showed that far too many girls are sad and anxious and concealing their troubles from others. In 2019, the Lancet published research showing girls’ rates of self-harm had tripled since 2000. Other studies show girls are much more likely to be depressed or anxious than boys. This might surprise. Aren’t today’s girls growing up in an age of equality, inheritors of girl power? They’re more likely than boys to go to university. They have better economic prospects than any generation of females that went before them. Empowered female role models are more visible than

Thursday

Melissa Kite

The surreal purgatory of A&E

‘This is my father, and his pronoun is he,’ said the builder boyfriend, checking his dad into Accident and Emergency. ‘And how do we address you?’ said the personage at the reception desk. ‘You can address me as they,’ said the builder b, who was happy to go along with the way the hospital wanted to do things, if only to entertain himself during what was obviously going to be a long wait. His father had fallen on top of a gas canister in their building yard and he was now in so much pain they suspected he had broken his ribs. So off they went to a London casualty

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: In defence of the police

A health-care disaster Sir: Kate Andrews’s piece on who really controls the NHS (‘Waiting game’, 12 February) gives us a flavour of how things have come to this: an unaccountable health service with a government attached. We are about to enter a new phase, with additional taxation in the form of increased NI based on promises which are already looking hollow — waiting lists will continue to rise. There is no sign that the 100,000 key workers who are needed are going to be found any time soon. The truth of the matter is that the people have been fed a number of lies for decades: that health care in

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Revealed: how the NHS waiting list will hit 9.2 million

Before the pandemic hit, NHS England waiting lists were at a record high of 4.4 million. Three lockdowns later, they’ve risen to six million: an unacceptable figure for a Tory government which has spent years trying to rebrand itself as the ‘party of the NHS’. Boris Johnson’s decision to break his manifesto pledge and raise taxes was directly linked to the idea that the money would first be funnelled into the health service to fix the backlog. So can he now deliver for patients? When Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced his ‘elective recovery plan’ in the House of Commons on Tuesday, he said that the waiting list would start shrinking

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Queen Camilla, a cabinet rejig and NHS waiting list warning

Home In a message for the 70th anniversary of her accession, the Queen said it was her sincere wish that ‘when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort’. She signed the message: ‘Your servant, Elizabeth R.’ Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the government would pay energy suppliers to discount bills by £200 in October, but customers would then have to pay back £40 a year for five years. People living in houses of the A-D council tax bands would receive a £150 rebate. The regular Ofgem energy price cap adjustment meant that a typical household would pay £693 extra a year, a 54 per

Wednesday

Kate Andrews

Exclusive: Leaked NHS report shows waiting list hitting 9.2 million

Before the pandemic hit, NHS England waiting lists were at a record high of 4.4 million. Three lockdowns later, they’ve risen to six million: an unacceptable figure for a Tory government that has spent years trying to rebrand itself as the ‘party of the NHS’. Boris Johnson’s decision to break his manifesto pledge and raise taxes was directly linked to the idea that the money would first be funnelled into the health service to fix the backlog. So can he now deliver for patients? When Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced his ‘elective recovery plan’ in the House of Commons on Tuesday, he said that the waiting list would start shrinking

Thursday

Charles Moore

Downing Street’s growing problem

In answers to questions following his statement in the Commons on Monday, Boris Johnson let drop an interesting statistic. He said that, ‘on busy days’, more than 400 officials work in 10 Downing Street. This figure explains a lot — why so many staff there got Covid, why, after long hours in overcrowded conditions, they might want to open bottles of wine, why factions struggle for mastery and leak against each other, and why the heart of government suffers from clogged arteries. With 400 rabbits in that warren, how can most of them know the Prime Minister personally, how can they feel much esprit de corps? The numbers are four

Thursday

Steve James

Why should I be sacked for refusing the Covid vaccine?

A few months ago, Sajid Javid was asked how he could justify sacking unvaccinated care home workers if they had been infected with Covid and had natural immunity. The Health Secretary replied as if such people were plainly idiots. ‘If they haven’t taken a vaccine — despite all the effort that’s been made to persuade them, encourage them, provide them with information, introduce them to trusted voices — then at some point you have to move on.’ By ‘move on’ he meant thousands of them should be fired. NHS staff are next in line: we have until 1 April to get jabbed or get out. On a recent visit to

The Spectator

When did the anti-vaxx movement begin?

No vax There is nothing new about the anti-vax crowds supporting Novak Djokovic. Organised protest in Britain began with the formation of the Leicester Anti-Vaccination League in 1869. Vaccination of children against smallpox had been compulsory since 1853, but faith in the vaccine plummeted with an epidemic which erupted in the city in spite of vaccination — 314 died from the disease in 1871/72. There was also increasing anger at the jailing of vaccine refuseniks, 61 of whom were imprisoned between 1869 and 1884. Thousands gathered on 23 March 1885 for an anti-vaccination march from the Temperance Hall to the Market Place. In 1898 the law was revised to allow

Saturday

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson

Masks in schools: how convincing is the government’s evidence?

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’

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Sajid Javid confronted by unjabbed NHS doctor

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