The ADHD chronicles: Squeezing through the bars of the iron cage
My first two attempts to get evaluated for ADHD only resulted in promises that the psychologist would call me back. This never happened, and the only official indication that I was ever in contact with him/her was the invoices I...
More…
Not in the club? It’s par for the course
Golf is a game where individual players hit a small plastic and rubber ball (a descendant of the ‘hairy ball’ it is believed), with a largely metal club. It is widely understood to have originated in Fife, on the east...
More…
Falling out of love with the car?
Have we reached ‘peak car’? Many pointers in the UK and internationally suggest we have. There’s been a slow down, even a reverse, in our love affair with the private car. On average, those of us in high income countries...
More…
Governing in the heat
As I write it’s baking hot, and seems to have been for days. The usual risks apply to writing about it though. By the time this is published the thunder storms we have been promised may have brought cooler wetter...
More…
On Brexit, Nurses and Migrant Workers in the NHS
Figures released this week by the Nursing and Midwifery Council show a 96% drop in the number of EU nurses applying for jobs in the UK after the Brexit vote in June 2016. In July 2016, 1304 nurses joined the...
More…
Tory landslide Was Averted
So, there is a general election tomorrow. Maybe one of the most critical elections in the post-war period. If you are reading this blog, the chances are that you deeply care about the NHS, schools, universities and believe in having...
More…
Muddying the NHS waters- a 5 year forward view
I knew it was coming. I didn’t know what shape it would take but I knew that, eventually, my habit of drinking voracious daily amounts of Diet Pepsi would eventually catch me up. I’d been told once by a drunken...
More…
Learning to Drink in Nigeria
In Nigeria, there is no concept of ‘counting your units’ nor are there nationally co-ordinated public health campaigns to challenge the normalisation of drinking alcohol ‘to excess’. With little or no regulation of the alcohol industry, transnational drinks companies are...
More…
Extending Patient Access to GPs: who will benefit?
Investing in extended patient access to GPs is a key government objective, but which patients will benefit, and will it have its intended consequences? Despite little evidence that it is demanded by patients, extended access to GPs, providing care outside...
More…
Progressive alliances & the parlous state of British democracy
There was news this week that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt faces an ‘unauthorised’ progressive alliance in his Surrey constituency that will attempt (against Labour Party policy) to unseat him in the forthcoming general election. The proposal is that local Labour...
More…
It was Big Tobacco, not Trump, that wrote the post-truth rule book
After two chaotic months as president, Donald Trump is widely credited with rewriting the political rule book. We are witnessing Trump’s new era of post-fact politics, where distraction and obfuscation are central, and critical stories are dismissed as “fake news”....
More…
Climate change set to increase air pollution deaths by hundreds of thousands by 2100