Terminally ill people with less than six months to live will have right to choose procedure after approval from doctors and panel
Terminally ill people in England and Wales are to be given the right to an assisted death in a historic societal shift that will transform end-of-life care.
After months of argument, MPs narrowly voted in favour of a private member’s bill introduced by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, which could become law within four years.
Continue reading...Government announces £9m funding to make specialist blood machines more widely available across NHS
People living with sickle cell disease in England are to benefit from quicker and more accessible treatment due to a £9m investment, the government has announced.
Apheresis services, which are a type of treatment that removes harmful components from a patient’s blood, are to improve across England through the funding of more specialist treatment centres. The funding will ensure the wider availability of machines that remove a patient’s sickled red blood cells and replace them with healthy donor cells.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Letter from six top figures says more walkouts by junior colleagues would help those who oppose the NHS
Six senior figures in England’s medical profession have criticised potential strikes by resident doctors as “a futile gesture” that will harm patients and help those who oppose the NHS.
The move is the first public evidence of the significant unease many senior doctors feel about the possibility of their junior colleagues staging a new campaign of industrial action in England.
Continue reading...Move is part of £450m Wes Streeting plan to tackle long delays and end hospital overcrowding
Hundreds of thousands of patients needing urgent medical help will be treated in settings other than A&E as part of a drive to cut “corridor care” and avoid another NHS winter crisis.
The move is a central plank of a government plan to improve urgent and emergency care in England, tackle the long delays many patients face in A&E and banish overcrowding in hospitals.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Government-ordered review concludes term in NHS should be changed because of risks to patients’ safety
Physician associates in the NHS will be renamed to stop patients mistaking them for doctors after a review found that their title caused widespread confusion.
Thousands of physician associates who work in hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK take medical histories, examine patients and diagnose illnesses but are not doctors.
Continue reading...Exclusive: RCN’s Nicola Ranger says nurses could ‘bare our teeth’ as they seek restoration of lost earnings
Nurses deserve a 25% pay rise and may go on strike again unless ministers dramatically improve their “completely unacceptable” 2.8% offer to NHS staff, the profession’s leader has said.
Prof Nicola Ranger, the general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said nurses wanted full restoration of lost earnings and could “bare our teeth” in pursuit of that goal.
Continue reading...Trusts having to ‘think the previously unthinkable’ to make savings demanded by new NHS England boss
Hospitals in England are cutting staff, closing services and planning to ration care in order to make “eye-watering” savings demanded by NHS bosses.
Rehabilitation centres face being shut, talking therapies services cut and beds for end-of-life care reduced as part of efforts by England’s 215 NHS trusts to comply with a “financial reset”.
47% were cutting services and another 43% were considering doing so.
37% were cutting clinical posts and a further 40% may follow suit.
26% were closing some services and 55% more may do so.
Continue reading...About 14% of premature deaths in England attributable to unhealthy food, the most among surveyed countries
Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
Continue reading...Effective Monday, the agency suspends its proficiency testing program for grade ‘A’ raw milk and finished products
The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality-control program for testing fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.
The suspension is another disruption to the nation’s food-safety programs after the termination and departure of 20,000 employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, as part of Donald Trump’s effort to shrink the federal workforce.
Continue reading...Investigators find coordination failures between NHS and care bodies causing delays, distress and burnout
Navigating England’s “complex” health and care system is “extremely difficult” and carers and patients are experiencing burnout, distress and harm as a result, a damning report says.
There were frequent failures by NHS and care organisations in coordinating care for people with long-term health conditions, the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) found. Figures show 41% of adults and 17% of children have at least one long-term health issue.
Continue reading...World Cancer Research Fund goes further than UK and WHO advice on alcohol after review of evidence
Women should avoid alcohol altogether to reduce their risk of breast cancer, a charity has warned.
The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) has published a review of evidence on how diet and lifestyle factors can play a role in the development of the disease.
Continue reading...Exclusive: NHS England has dramatically increased recruitment of workers from states with critical medical staff shortages
Brexit has left the NHS increasingly dependent on doctors and nurses from poor “red list” countries, from which the World Health Organization says it is wrong to recruit.
The health service in England has hired tens of thousands of health staff from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe since the UK left the EU single market at the end of 2020.
Continue reading...Thinktank predicts PM will not realise ambition for 92% of patients in England to wait less than 18 weeks for planned care by 2029
Keir Starmer is unlikely to fulfil his pledge to restore the maximum 18-week wait for planned hospital care before the next election, a leading thinktank has said.
The prime minister has made bringing back the 18-week access standard in England, by ensuring that 92% of patients are seen within that time, one of the six “milestones” he has promised to achieve by 2029.
Continue reading...Lord Darzi’s undeclared interests in four companies included $500,000 of shares in US-based healthcare venture
The independent peer Lord Darzi, a senior adviser to the government on the NHS, failed to officially declare shareholdings in healthcare companies worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Ara Darzi is an eminent surgeon and professor at Imperial College London whose report on the NHS for the government in September informed the decision announced last week by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to abolish NHS England. Darzi also has an extensive portfolio of private interests in commercial medical companies.
Continue reading...Lord Agnew says fast-track PPE procurement was not ‘some kind of plan by rightwing people to enrich themselves’
A former minister behind the controversial VIP lane for supplying personal protective equipment during the pandemic said “some crooks” were probably awarded contracts, but defended the scheme as necessary to plug shortages.
Lord Agnew, who was a Cabinet Office minister responsible for procurement during the pandemic, accused the Covid inquiry of having a “misconceived obsession with the high-priority lane”.
Continue reading...Loss of staff will be at least twice as big as thought, as new NHS England chief tells regional boards to cut costs by 50%
The jobs cull from the government’s radical restructuring of the NHS will be at least twice as big as previously thought, with other parts of the health service now being downsized too.
The staff shakeout caused by NHS England’s abolition and unprecedented cost-cutting elsewhere will mean the number of lost posts will soar from the 10,000 expected to between 20,000 and 30,000.
Continue reading...Scientific triumphs were made in the battle against the pandemic, but the memories and lessons are already in danger of being lost
On 9 March 2020, Martin Landray was studying the likely impact of Covid-19 as it started to sweep Britain. What was needed, he realised, was a method for pinpointing cheap, effective drugs that might limit the impact of the Sars-CoV-2 virus that was filling UK hospitals with dangerously ill patients.
Within 10 days, Landray – working with Oxford University colleague Peter Horby – had set up Recovery, a drug-testing programme that involved thousands of doctors and nurses working with tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients in UK hospitals.
Continue reading...New method reported to cut number of false positives by 87% has been registered with regulator for approval
A new swab test could help hundreds of thousands of women a year in the UK who may have womb cancer avoid having an often painful invasive procedure to detect the disease.
About 800,000 women annually go to see a GP because they are suffering from abnormal bleeding from their uterus and then undergo uncomfortable and stressful investigations to identify the cause.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Medics more sleep deprived now than during Covid crisis amid staff shortages and surging demand
One in three doctors in the NHS are so tired that their ability to treat patients is impaired, according to a report that reveals medics are more sleep deprived now than during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Longer hours, staff shortages and soaring demand for care on top of the backlog that worsened during the Covid crisis are causing extreme tiredness among doctors, leading to memory blanks, problems concentrating and patient harm.
Continue reading...Chair rules that details about PPE contracts given to company linked to Tory peer will be heard in closed session
The Covid inquiry will hear detailed evidence about the multimillion-pound PPE contracts awarded during the crisis to a company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone, but in private, the inquiry chair has ruled.
The National Crime Agency has since May 2021 been investigating potential criminal offences committed in the procurement of the contracts awarded to the company, PPE Medpro, and argued that its investigation could be prejudiced if the inquiry heard evidence in public.
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