Category Archives: Health

Budget deficit to halve this financial year but spending pressures mean boost will be short-lived

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Jim Chalmers’ first budget to reveal $42bn improvement to bottom line across forward estimates but conditions will deteriorate after two years

Soaring commodity prices and a strong labour market will deliver a $42bn boost to the budget bottom line over the next four years, with the deficit more than halving this financial year.

However, the improvement – to be revealed in Jim Chalmers’ first budget on Tuesday night – will be short-lived, with worse-than-expected deficits by the end of the forward estimates as a result of growing spending pressures.

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Patients dying daily due to poor ‘soft skills’ among Australian surgeons, experts warn

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Nearly all avoidable deaths in surgery exhibit a breakdown in communication and cooperation, research shows, as doctors call for system reform

More than 1,000 Australians die unnecessarily in hospital each year due to avoidable failures by surgeons, according to experts calling for a senate inquiry.

Graham Beaumont, PhD, and Dr John North are both long-term members of audit committees that review surgical mortality in Australia.

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Australia and Japan sign new security deal; flood waters peaking in northern Victoria – as it happened

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Volunteers place 195,000 sandbags in and around Echuca, which could reach devastating 1993 flood levels. This blog is now closed

Australian ultrarunner on pace to break daily marathon world record

Did you know that you have the genes to be a long distance runner?

If you go back to our early genetics, basically, everyone has the genes to be a distance runner. Back 50,000 years ago, our survival depended on us being able to walk and jog long distances to be able to get food, and catch animals.

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NHS to offer epilepsy patients new form of laser surgery

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Move will help up to 150 patients a year whose condition has not responded positively to anti-seizure drugs

Up to 150 people a year with epilepsy will have a potentially life-changing new form of surgery on the part of their brain that is causing their seizures, in an NHS initiative.

NHS England is making available a “world-leading” fibre-optic laser beam surgery that would let epilepsy sufferers avoid having to undergo neurosurgery, which is much more invasive.

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Victoria Greens spruik family ties in election pitch as ageing millennials defy drift to conservatism

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Reproductive rights and parenting become hot topics in state election as parties on the left court women and young families

Kissing babies may be an election campaign trail cliche but for the Victorian Greens, it might also be sign their party – just like their supporter base – has grown up.

Announcing a plan for five days of reproductive leave for public sector workers this week, leader Samantha Ratnam, deputy Ellen Sandell and their candidate for the seat of Richmond, Gabrielle de Vietri, were joined by their children under two.

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Thousands at risk as A&E queues stop NHS paramedics attending 999 calls

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Paramedics in England missing 117,000 urgent calls each month, as CQC warns of ‘worrying new status quo’

Paramedics in England cannot respond to 117,000 urgent 999 calls every month because they are stuck outside hospitals looking after patients, figures show.

The amount of time ambulance crews had to wait outside A&E units meant they were unavailable to attend almost one in six incidents.

673 patients had to wait 10 hours or more to be handed over to A&E staff – NHS guidelines say no one should wait more than 15 minutes.

45,000 patients were delayed for at least an hour and 21,000 for at least two hours – just under the highest numbers ever seen.

While crews spent 558,000 hours attending incidents, they were unable to complete another 117,000 “job cycles”, which equates to 21% of total ambulance capacity – huge rises on the 45,000 job cycles or 7% of capacity in October 2019.

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‘Absolutely horrendous’: woman left incontinent after giving birth blames Mackay Base hospital failures

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Samantha Sheppard is considering joining a growing number of women in a class action lawsuit against the hospital

Three years ago, Samantha Sheppard checked into Mackay Base hospital to have her first child. What followed, she said, was an ordeal she believes could have killed her baby, Bobby, and that has left her unable to control some of her basic bodily functions.

“It was absolutely horrendous. It was so life changing. I live with a pad on every day. I weigh myself every day. I’ve actually peed myself countless times because I can’t control it,” she said.

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Floods and warm weather perfect storm for Japanese encephalitis outbreak in Australia, researchers warn

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Modellers say those within 4km of an infected piggery potentially vulnerable, meaning 740,546 people at risk of mosquito-borne virus

Warming temperatures combined with flood waters could leave almost 750,000 Australians vulnerable to Japanese encephalitis – a disease that until last year was confined to Asia and far-northern Australia.

The mosquito-borne disease was first detected on the Australian mainland in 1998, but its range expanded dramatically earlier this year. Cases were reported in dozens of southern piggeries (pigs are one of the main carriers of the virus) and there were also 31 confirmed cases in humans and six deaths.

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Children whose parents lack warmth more likely to grow up obese, study finds

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UK data shows authoritarian or neglectful parenting linked to higher weight in children and adolescents

Children whose parents lack warmth are more likely to grow up overweight or obese, according to the first study of its kind.

The effects of different parenting styles on children’s weight have been determined for the first time – and suggest parental warmth is key to a healthy weight, researchers at the International Congress on Obesity in Melbourne, the biennial congress of the World Obesity Federation, will say on Wednesday.

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‘Canberra ketamine’: new recreational drug discovered at Australian pill-testing service

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‘As far as we’re aware, this is the first detection of a new drug by a drug-checking service anywhere in the world,’ says professor


A new recreational drug dubbed CanKet, similar to ketamine but with unknown side effects, has been found by scientists at Australia’s first fixed pill-testing site.

CanTEST, a face-to-face drug-checking service, was launched in Canberra in August. Since then, almost 200 people have brought their recreational drugs in for analysis and advice based on the results. Some people choose to discard their drugs if the service finds they are laced with harmful or unexpected substances.

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Fauci urges US to resume long Covid research funding efforts

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Top disease expert warns against prematurely declaring victory over pandemic in interview with the Guardian

Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, has warned against prematurely declaring victory over the pandemic, not only due to short-term needs but because long Covid represents an “insidious” public health emergency for millions of people.

In an interview with the Guardian, Fauci urged the US Congress not to be complacent and to resume funding efforts to combat the virus, including the scourge of long Covid, which remains scientifically elusive but understood to hit women and people of colour especially hard.

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China bans fruity vapes – but not their export to the UK

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Popular disposable brand will still be able to sell products in Britain, despite being accused of flouting advertising regulations

China has banned the sale of flavoured e-cigarettes as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on the industry. The new rules mean vapes that have flavourings other than tobacco – such as those that taste fruity or sweet – cannot be sold on the domestic market.

But they can still be manufactured in China to be shipped around the world, including to the UK, where Chinese-made brands such as Elfbar, known for its range of flavoured disposable vapes, are popular.

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Common drugs could fight obesity and diabetes, say scientists

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Researchers identify medications that could be repurposed, including treatments for heart conditions and stomach ulcers

Scientists have pinpointed a range of commonly used medicines that could be repurposed to treat people suffering from obesity and diabetes.

The medicines – to be outlined at the International Congress on Obesity in Melbourne this weekend – include treatments for stomach ulcers and heart rhythm disorders and were identified using sophisticated computer programs.

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Queensland police discipline failures in ‘clear breach’ of workplace health and safety laws, says lawyer

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Commissioner says not all officers have had a safe workplace as critics label complaints procedure a joke

The Queensland Police Service continues to employ frontline officers whose actions resulted in payouts worth millions of dollars to victims of bullying and harassment, Guardian Australia has learned.

The commission of inquiry into Queensland police responses to domestic violence has revealed dozens of instances where officers were found to have engaged in racism, sexism, misogyny and bullying. In many of these cases, officers were repeat offenders and not subject to disciplinary action.

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Coronavirus levels rise across most of UK with 1.7m people infected

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In England about one in 35 people had Covid in week ending 3 October, according to ONS data

Covid infection levels are rising across much of the UK, with more than 1.7 million people thought to have had the virus in the most recent week, data has revealed.

About one in 35 people in England – 2.8% of the population – had Covid in the week ending 3 October based on swabs from randomly selected households, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. It is an increase from one in 50 the week before.

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Dismay as key cholera vaccine is discontinued

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Exclusive: halt to production of Shanchol vaccine alarms WHO amid ‘unprecedented’ global outbreaks

The manufacturer of one of only two cholera vaccines for use in humanitarian emergencies is to halt production at the end of this year, just as the world faces an “unprecedented” series of deadly outbreaks, the Guardian has learned.

Shantha Biotechnics, a wholly owned Indian subsidiary of the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, will stop production of its Shanchol vaccine within months and cease supply by the end of 2023, causing alarm among health officials.

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Covid quarantine centre to reopen for flood evacuees – as it happened

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Daniel Andrews says 500 homes have been flooded and another 500 have been isolated. This blog is now closed

An estimated 500 homes are flooded in Victoria with number expected to grow: Daniel Andrews

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, has been on ABC radio Melbourne this morning, providing listeners with an update on the floods.

Obviously this has been a very, very significant flood event and it’s far from over. There’s a little bit more rainfall but as that weather event passes through, the real challenge is waters continuing to rise and more and more houses being inundated, more and more communities being closed off, becoming isolated, then of course we move to clean up and all of those issues.

We think there’s about 500 homes that are flooded, we think there are another 500 that have been isolated across the state. But I would just say they’re very early estimates and the aerial intelligence gathering choppers are up in the air now ... they’ll be doing all their reports back to the state control centre. So I’d say those numbers are absolutely certain to grow. And indeed, we’re still asking people to leave in some areas. There have been important, important evacuation notices have been issued in a number of communities. So those numbers will go up. That’s why we’ve got nine important relief centres opening and 50 sandbag collection points. There’s an enormous amount of work going on.

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Why global investors are piling into the UK’s luxury care home sector

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With people aged 65 and over controlling 51% of Britain’s wealth, the logic for investors is simple

• Canadian owners of care homes avoided UK taxes, researchers claim

With a spa, cinema and wood-panelled hall, Reigate Grange in Surrey, where Ann King was abused, is part of a growing trend for luxury care homes. Fuelled by global investors’ desire to capitalise on older people’s property wealth, luxury care applies a cruise-ship sheen to the grittier reality of dementia and the end of life.

The logic for investors is simple. People aged 65 and over in the UK now control 51% of Britain’s wealth, up from 42% in 2008, the year of the financial crash, according to the Resolution Foundation. A large minority of older people can afford £100,000-a-year care home fees because they have houses worth far more that they no longer need. A person in a £1m home who survives for the typical two years of a care home resident would still leave £800,000 in their will.

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Victoria’s 208 LGBTQ+ suicides to be outlined for the first time in new report

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Exclusive: Coroner suspects ‘undercount’ as a decade of suicide data is released to the public

More than 200 LGBTQ+ Victorians have died by suicide in the past decade, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by the state’s coroner.

In a report to be released on Friday, the coroner’s court of Victoria identified 208 deaths by suicide – recorded between 2012 and 2021 – of people who are LGBTQ+.

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First ever amber alert for NHS blood supplies could mean cancelled surgery

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Hospitals ordered to protect stocks as they fall to critical level amid shortage of staff to take donations

The NHS has declared its first ever amber alert over blood supplies after they fell to a critically low level, prompting warnings that hospitals in England may be forced to cancel operations to protect their stocks.

An NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) official confirmed that overall blood stocks in NHS England were at three days’ worth and levels of O-type had dropped to less than two days’. The normal standard is to hold at least six days’ worth of blood in stock at all times.

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