Where has all the kindness gone?
In October 2015 I wrote about the implications of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader standing on the pledge of a new “kinder politics and a more caring society”. I talked about the glimmer of hope offered...
More…
Can a movie help us see an invisible health crisis?
Lesley Henderson interviews the producer of ‘A Plastic Ocean’ The impact of Brexit on environmental regulation and how best to safeguard our health from the growing problem of pollution are issues that have been heavily discussed since the EU referendum...
More…
Brexit and its discontents
Many of us will have sat stunned on the morning of Friday 24th June wondering how Great Britain could have committed such a blatant act of self-harm by voting to leave the European Union. At one turn jeopardising our human...
More…
On bulls, men and risk
Pamplona’s festival of San Fermín is best known for the encierro, or Running of the Bulls Each morning, six fighting bulls are run through the city streets on their way to the bull ring. With them run six steers and...
More…
‘Corporate Wellness’: blurring the lines
Are workplace wellness programs really about helping us to be healthy or are they trying to make us into better workers? An increasing amount of workplaces are asking their employees to join in fun activities which help them to be...
More…
Caring for Carers
Did you know that the 6th and 12th of June was Carers Week? A range of events and activities taking place all across the UK celebrating the work of carers and raising awareness of the challenges they face. It is...
More…
On Brexit, Hamsters & Hungry Pythons!
As we move towards the referendum on membership of the EU, British citizens face a bewildering array of claims and counterclaims. The conventional wisdom is that the voting public will favour the ‘status quo bias‘. Unfortunately, we seem to be...
More…
Scarred for life
At a research meeting last week, a general practitioner who offers health checks to young, unaccompanied refugees, described his work. He had interviewed 44 young men from Afghanistan who all, report themselves to be in good health, with no special...
More…
Improving health? Start local
Ideas about place based systems of care are currently fashionable in policy circles. I have previously written about initiativitis, (plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose’ or ‘here we go again’) but I am resisting the cynical temptation to...
More…
A ‘tour de force’ of obfuscation
A note on Sustainability and Transformation Plans in your brand new NHS Obfuscation is the obscuring of intended meaning in communication, making the message confusing, willfully ambiguous, or harder to understand. It may be intentional or unintentional (although the former...
More…
Lights out for health?
Across the UK, the lights are going out. As local authorities seek to cut costs, street lights are being turned off or dimmed at night – with much local media concern about what this means for safety. But is less...
More…
Nasty Bugs and Foreign Threats