Detoxing Schools: Do lotteries for school places offer the best medicine?
The best social science book I have read this year is Toxic Schools, Bowen Paulle’s account of urban high-school-life in New York and Amsterdam. Paulle demonstrates how divisive educational systems that segregate poor, black and other ethnic minority students into...
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Ebola: Media Narratives and Public Responses
The Ebola crisis has been described by the WHO as “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times” and national governments, aid organisations and others have reacted to the crisis at this level. But what about public understandings...
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Evidence, Experience & Exclusions: A review of a recent workshop
‘Can experience be used as evidence?’ That was the question at a workshop organized earlier this month by the Health Experiences Group at Oxford. The question does not only interest academics. Researchers from different disciplines were joined by clinicians, policy...
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Last throw of the dice…?
Is the granting of new rights to desperate patients and their doctors in the Medical Innovations Bill a valiant attempt to save lives – or will it turn the NHS into an unethical guinea-pig farm?
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Can we blame the recession for healthcare austerity?
In the early 1990s, following a decade of state retrenchment under Thatcher and Reagan, political scientist Paul Pierson observed that despite repeated efforts to reduce healthcare spending “governments generally found health care to be a cause of political headaches rather...
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The Bad Patient
Questions of good patients and bad patients mean different things to professionals and policy makers. Is patient empowerment something tangible or are patients simply a pawn between these competing interests?
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Science, Media and Ethics: an uneasy mix?
Is it possible to ‘sell science’ responsibly? It has been argued by many that much science reporting is based on fanciful and emotive news headlines that can misrepresent a story in order to draw readers in. Important strides have been...
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Is Care Unsafe for People with a Learning Disability? The Case of Connor Sparrowhawk
Connor Sparrowhawk was 18 years old when he drowned in the bath in a NHS short term treatment and assessment facility (Slade House run by Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust) on 4th July 2013. He had learning disabilities and epilepsy...
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Letter to Ed Miliband: full text of letter from National Health Action Party
Friday, 19 September 2014 Dear Mr Miliband We are writing to you as concerned doctors and co-leaders of the National Health Action Party. We set up this party to defend and improve the NHS and hold to account politicians who...
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GPs aren’t private companies – but the private takeover is nearing
All GP practices will have to open to private sector competition, NHS England has announced. Is this why 85% of GPs think the NHS will be fully privatised in 10 years? ‘All you GPs are private providers anyway’ I often have...
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The Janus–face of e-cigarettes
“I feel like there is a new toy in the market, let’s try this you know because it’s supposed to be healthy and not cause any health problems, but it’s a chemical that they don’t need. It’s not going to...
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Visibility and invisibility in a leaderless NHS