Category Archives: Hospitals

The Cave review – horror and hope in a Syrian hospital battered by war

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This powerful, immensely moving documentary follows the courageous medical staff who must treat injured children as bombs fall around them

Feras Fayyad, the young Syrian documentary-maker who filmed Last Men in Aleppo (and was himself imprisoned and tortured by Bashar al-Assad’s regime), returns with a chilling, shaming film made over two years inside a Syrian hospital in Ghouta, the city besieged by the Syrian government for five years until 2018.

If there is a chink of hope here it’s Amani Ballour, the hospital’s manager, a paediatrician in her late 20s. “I know this life is tough. But it’s honest,” she says. Her deep sense of purpose is humbling – it carries her through hellish days treating dozens of bloodied and badly injured children. Her gentleness with patients is desperately moving, too.

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New inpatients banned at mental health unit rated unsafe

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Damning CQC report on private Cygnet Acer clinic where patients could self harm and one died by hanging

A privately run mental health unit has been banned from admitting new patients after inspectors found numerous safety failings, one of which led to a resident dying by hanging.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has stopped the Cygnet Acer Clinic, in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, from accepting new inpatients. It declared that the facility was “not safe” for people to use.

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Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days

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The anti-medical dogma of Christian Science led my father to an agonising death. Now the church itself is in decline – and it can’t happen fast enough. By Caroline Fraser

When I was a baby, my grandfather delighted me by playing a game. He made a fist sandwich, fingers laced together and hidden in his palms, showing me his thumbs closed upon them. Slowly, he would say, “Here’s the church, and here’s the steeple,” raising his index fingers together to form a peak. Then, throwing his thumbs apart, he flipped his interlaced fingers over, wriggling them and crying out, “Open the doors and see all the people!”

My grandfather was a Christian Scientist. His mother had been a Scientist. His only child, my father, was a Scientist. I was raised to be a Scientist.

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Hancock pledges hospital food overhaul after listeria deaths

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Factory production of sandwiches linked to five cases is halted as health secretary demands action

Health secretary Matt Hancock has ordered a “root and branch” review of NHS food after two more patient deaths were linked last week to a listeria outbreak. The new deaths bring the number of suspected fatalities to five and doctors have warned that further cases could occur.

Hancock said he was “incredibly concerned” after it emerged the patients were suspected of dying as a result of eating pre-packaged sandwiches and salads linked by the same supplier, The Good Food Chain.

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Johns Hopkins Hospital sued poor and African American patients, study shows

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Baltimore hospital filed 2,400 lawsuits often against poor and black patients for unpaid medical bills between 2009 and 2018

Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, filed over 2,000 lawsuits often against poor and African American patients, and including many of their own neighbors, for unpaid medical bills, a new study has revealed.

The hospital, one of the state’s largest, filed 2,400 lawsuits between 2009 and 2018 that totaled $4.8m in alleged debt from patients, according to a report from American unions AFL-CIO and National Nurses United and community advocacy group Coalition for a Humane Hopkins. The median unpaid debt that led to a lawsuit was $1,438.

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