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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Market Town : Simon – Living with Epilepsy – Brave New World
Introduction by Lynne Pettinger: It’s not always easy to look at Jim Mortram’s photography, but it’s always worth doing so. In this series, part of his ‘small town inertia’ project, he photographs Simon. Simon’s got epilepsy, and has been put...
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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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Our NHS: a place for ethical consumption?
Two weeks ago the news covered a tragic death: a seven week old baby, Axel, succumbed to a chest infection despite repeated contact with the health services. The story gained traction not so much as a narrative of professional mistakes,...
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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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‘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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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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The NHS Constitution: What is it good for?
This week saw the launch of a national consultation aimed at updating the NHS Constitution for England, which was implemented in 2009 under Gordon Brown’s Labour Government. The constitution itself sounds wonderful, apparently it “establishes the principles and values of...
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Becoming a consumer: who’s got the energy?
Last week’s announcement that the state will force energy companies to provide customers with their cheapest gas and electricity tariffs is interesting for a number of reasons. It seems the policy will require energy companies to notify customers of cheaper...
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The cost of bleeping care
I recently read a fascinating and perplexing tale of the contingencies of work in healthcare, where ‘state of the art’ equipment sits alongside ‘stone age’ communication devices. The first time I saw a pager, in 1994, I thought it was...
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The Privatisation Paradox
Log into twitter and follow the #NHS hashtag and it doesn’t take long to conclude that the NHS is in the throes of a back-door privatisation programme, driven by an overzealous government with the ideological ‘bit’ between its teeth. This...
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Preserving the Fertility of Cancer Patients: Necessary Treatment or Additional Luxury?