Counting the cost of heroic surgical intervention
The practice of medicine involves interesting contradictions. In the name of treatment, clinicians regularly inflict pain on people who are already suffering. Medicine promises to alleviate pain in the long-term through an intervention that exacerbates it. Such is the strength...
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Playing the blame game: political capital and Mid Staffs
The much-anticipated Francis Report on the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry was published last week. At the centre of the inquiry was the elevated level of Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs). Essentially this means that death-rates in this...
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Loneliness, conflation and ideology
We are told that levels of loneliness are increasing, figures from the Campaign to End Loneliness suggest that 1 in 5 people are sometimes lonely and that 1 in 10 over 65s are ‘chronically lonely’. Further research tells us that...
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Inequality as a test of strength…?
Notions of recovery and resilience are ubiquitous at the moment. Resilience particularly seems to have made the jump from a concept in positive psychology material into a mainstream policy objective ranging across inequality, poverty, and community wellbeing (to name but...
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‘Akuten’
King’s College Hospital currently has an appeal for funds which urges us to text a five pound donation to ‘improve the life-saving care we provide for our patients’. Hospitals used to be state funded. As insidious as the implication that...
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Can we afford to abandon universal benefits?
With means tested child benefit, and older people’s bus passes under threat we’re told that subsiding the affluent and universal benefits are no longer affordable. New rules this week for parents where one earns over £50k mean filling in complicated...
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End of Term Quiz: should I stay or should I go?
In these uncertain times you might find yourself wondering about whether it is worth the stress of applying for a new job, sitting tight where you are for a few more years or checking out that mini-cab firm advertising for drivers at...
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NHS mid-term review: what have we learned so far?
The King’s Fund this week published a NHS mid-term review of UK health policy under the Coalition government. The report is organised around 8 key themes – Access, Patient Safety, Promoting Health, Managing Long Term Conditions, Clinical Effectiveness, Patient Experience,...
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Doctors, Welfare and the Deadly Workhouse
The Beveridge Report was published 70 years ago this week. This was the report which led to the formation of the modern Welfare State in Britain, so there’s been a lot of discussion about the ‘state of welfare today’, and...
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Suicide and austerity: exploring the link
In the last 12 months a number of studies have re-examined the relationship between suicide and unemployment across Europe and the United States. Suicide rates have accelerated in these countries following rapid rises in unemployment due to the economic crisis. Yet,...
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Public Health à la carte
New guidance on breast screening will stress the importance of individual choice in the context of access to (and understanding of) scientific information. It is now official NHS policy to draw attention to the fact that population-based breast cancer screening...
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Universal Credit and Welfare reform and the vilification of the ‘undeserving poor’