Last week’s Times investigation which revealed that more than 70,000 young people are being prescribed anti-depressants prompted a caustic letter from Clarissa Farr. Until recently, Ms Farr headed one of the most successful schools in the country, the private St Paul’s Girls School in London, a veritable factory for high flyers many of whose alumni […]
The bizarre case of former Barcelona footballer Eric Abidal has once more brought the issue of organ donation into the public eye. To recap, Spanish newspaper El Confidencial published reports suggesting that back in 2012 the club’s then president Sandro Rosell tried to buy the cancer-stricken player a liver on the black market and then claim the […]
Case 1. Baby James was born severely disabled and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. His distraught parents were reassured that there was a very low risk of recurrence in future pregnancies and James’ deficit was pure bad luck and not their fault. He entered the local care pathway with complex and intensive multi-disciplinary team support. […]
In both the 2010 and 2015 General Elections, the Conservative Party pledged to abolish the deficit and deal with the national debt. It was one of the key distinctions between them and the Labour Party. In fact, it was the core message of the 2015 General Election campaign: the choice between the “long term economic […]
Jeremy Hunt disclosed, as a newly elected Conservative MP in 2005, that his hobby was dancing the lambada: “My lifetime’s ambition is to be on Strictly Come Dancing.” Now that he has become Foreign Secretary it looks possible that his ultimate goal might one day be achieved. Or perhaps he could settle for being Prime […]
This Thursday a service was held in Westminster Abbey to mark the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service. It was a fitting setting to reflect on an institution that long ago supplanted the Church of England as Britain’s national religion. To mark the occasion, our parent organisation, the Centre for Policy Studies, published a […]
Today’s report from neurologist Paul Goldsmith on NHS pay is important for a number of reasons. The first is that it reveals the highly bureaucratic nature of pay administration, secondly it shows its geographical inflexibility, and thirdly, it supports powerfully the recent calls for a Royal Commission. As a members of the Nurses and Allied Professions […]
Two years ago, the government published a childhood obesity strategy that had been drafted by David Cameron’s administration. Despite the inclusion of a sugar tax and an unprecedented food reformulation programme, “public health” campaigners inevitably complained that it did not go far enough. Evidence subsequently came to light that Theresa May’s team had indeed stripped out some […]
Just in time for the NHS 70th birthday celebrations we get the news that our hallowed health service isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. According to a substantial new report by the King’s Fund, the UK is the third worst out of 18 rich countries at curing people of things that can be cured, […]
Something strange happened at Prime Minister’s Questions this week. A hard-left Labour leader attacked a Conservative Prime Minister for the recklessness of unfunded promises of extra spending on the NHS. This topsy-turvy exchange was an early piece of evidence that the 3.4 per cent increase in NHS funding announced by Theresa May on Monday has […]
The case of Billy Caldwell, the 12-year-old boy whose doctors were granted “exceptional” permission to prescribe a cannabis-based medicine, has reignited the long-running debate over the medical uses of the plant in Britain. Amid mounting public pressure, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, announced a review of the medical use of cannabis. Caldwell suffers from a […]
Rarely is the cruelty of an outdated policy made as clear as it was last week when Billy Caldwell had his medicinal cannabis oil confiscated. When Billy and his mother Charlotte departed Toronto, they knew the customs officials would be awaiting them on arrival on the other side of the Atlantic. But the pain and […]
If you’re under 30 — or have a child in their teens — then chances are you’ve heard of a game called Fortnite. Fortnite, a “survival shooter” video game released last year, has quickly become one of the most popular online games in the world — a towering cultural phenomenon on a par with Minecraft […]
Reading the Sunday papers can’t have been fun for Philip Hammond. After weeks of pressure from the health secretary and Number 10, it seems the chancellor has been forced to allow a big new spending pledge on the NHS to go ahead without any agreement yet on how it is to be funded. The chancellor […]
The only certainty about Theresa May’s announcement of more money for the NHS is that it won’t be enough and it won’t be spent wisely. That is because the structure, management and organisation of the NHS make it impossible to drive through the changes that are needed to make it run more efficiently, a problem […]
In a famous sketch from the 1987 Spitting Image Election Special, Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley stand up in a car in a town centre, brandish a red megaphone, and proceed to shout “nurses!” repeatedly to the assembled crowd. In recent weeks, the public debate over NHS funding has resembled that scene. The line between […]
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