The inconveniently excellent Beveridge NHS model: Part 1
NHS Model – made redundant for being too good? This is a blog in two parts. Part 1 will consider the international comparisons showing the current changes to the NHS as perverse in terms of the effect the sizeable increase...
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“crisis, what crisis?”
Recent media stories about an NHS crisis function to divert attention away from the ideologically driven dismantling of a national institution
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On trying to do therapy when your patient has no food or money
Last week, I called someone I was due to see that afternoon to remind them I was coming round (standard practice in learning disability, and good practice in general). ‘How are you?’, I asked. ‘A bit pissed off’, they said....
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Manufacturing perfect debtors: a comment on the UK debt industries
The growing issue of personal debt (the so-called debt crisis) is more and more being represented as an issue of individual financial capability and responsibility. Problems of personal debt are constructed as something that can be remedied through improved access to financial management...
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‘Hard Times’ in The Archers at Christmas
It is often said that if Charles Dickens were writing now it would be for a popular soap opera perhaps as a script-writer for BBC radio 4 serial The Archers. John Yorke described soaps as ‘modern morality plays’; the latest...
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Action and Foresight Sociologies – Urgent!
At the BSA’s Medical Sociology Group conference in York this year the ‘Cost of Living’ group (@Cost_ofLiving) organized a symposium to address the coalition government’s attack on the National Health Service (NHS) in England. It was a privilege, if a...
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Health Tourism: What are the real costs?
On 2 July, I found out that I could potentially lose my access to free NHS health care, due to proposals by Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health, to restrict access to the NHS for non-EU migrants. This...
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Poverty in Primetime – Reality TV in the Age of Austerity
For most developed countries the concept of “food poverty” is controversial. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlighted that living costs have risen 25% in the past five years and placed an “unprecedented” financial burden on the poor”....
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BLACK APRIL – There IS an alternative
Right wing politicians throughout Europe and beyond are working desperately hard to establish a new, shared and ‘objective’ fact – that the collective benefits of social care, community welfare, freely-accessible education and equitable healthcare are no longer affordable in the...
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Disability and austerity