Nhs

Brace yourselves for health week. After the rip-roaring success of the government’s ‘stop the boats’ week, you might forgive the NHS for looking a bit scared that now ministers have the health service on their media grid for the coming days. As with last week’s focus on illegal immigration, the government is kicking off with a series of pre-briefed stories in the Sunday newspapers about the health service – and it’s striking how many of them are designed to take the fight to Labour. There’s the claim in the Sun by Welsh Secretary David Davies that Sue Gray, who is about to become Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, ‘dragged her

Yet another of Rishi Sunak’s five targets looks to have slipped out of reach. Waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have climbed to another record high and now stand just shy of 7.6 million. There was a slight improvement for the longest waits: those waiting more than a year dropped slightly but still stand at a staggering 383,000. A very unlucky 314 have found themselves languishing on the lists for more than two years. Ministers gave the NHS a target to clear waits of more than 65 weeks by April next year, but there’s been little progress on those either. NHS managers were quick to blame strike action –

Will the government meet its NHS target? Health Secretary Steve Barclay was asked about this when he did the broadcast round this morning, arguing that even though there were record waiting numbers, the government had successfully reduced the longest waits. But as Fraser wrote this week in his Telegraph column, Rishi Sunak is having to face up to the chance that he might miss this (and most of his other) five ‘priorities’ which he said the British people should judge him against at the next election. But voters might be paying a little less attention to another area of care where things are visibly going backwards: mental health. When I

I recently wrote a column elsewhere about the junior doctors strike. As if often the way with this topic, it resulted in some strong and sometimes vituperative reactions.  It also led to many conversations with people in and around medicine.  Some of them thought I’d got things wrong. That’s a reasonable position to take, and it’s often useful to take criticism seriously. So I had a think about the column again, and concluded that there were indeed a few things I could have done better at.   Retention Of the various ‘you’ve got your facts wrong’ critiques of my column, the one I think that has most weight is that I

Next month, junior doctors in England will walk out for three consecutive days after an overwhelming majority voted to strike over pay and conditions. Just under 50,000 doctors were entitled to vote in the British Medical Association ballot, and 78 per cent did. Of the votes cast, 98 per cent voted in favour of strike action. The term ‘junior doctor’ refers to newly qualified foundation doctors, as well as all those doctors ranked in between, up until and including senior registrars. These doctors are hoping for a 26 per cent pay rise – a figure they say would amount to ‘full pay restoration’ after the BMA concluded that junior doctors

For a politician who has set much store by being pretty boring, Keir Starmer seems to be enjoying his current provocative spell. His desire to shake up the ‘nonsense’ bureaucracy in the NHS makes the Sunday Telegraph splash and was a key feature of his interview this morning with Laura Kuenssberg. He argued that ‘the reason I want to reform the NHS is I want to preserve it’ and ‘I think if we don’t reform the health service it will be in managed decline’.  The Labour leader was insistent on the BBC that he didn’t want to touch the ‘founding principle of the NHS’, that it remained free at the

Rishi Sunak – The NHS ‘is under pressure’ Laura Kuenssberg kicked off her first show of the new year with an interview with the Prime Minister, who now has a maximum of just two years to turn his party’s ailing poll numbers around. The National Health Service has always posed its fair share of political problems, but with the system now suffering from industrial action, alongside what some are calling a ‘twindemic’ of Covid and flu cases, Kuenssberg asked Rishi Sunak if the NHS was in crisis: My healthcare arrangements are ‘a distraction’ Kuenssberg inquired as to whether Sunak used the NHS himself. Sunak was not comfortable being as frank

Workers are balloting for industrial action, attending mass demonstrations and preparing to strike. A ferocious tug-o’-war between trade unions and employers is playing out across the country. Though striking RMT members have been accused of ‘ruining Christmas’, the country’s greatest fears should be reserved for the NHS, which will see ambulance workers and nurses walk out before January, when junior doctors in England cast their vote on industrial action. Is there a solution? A leaked briefing from the Department of Health and Social Care suggests that the government believes volunteers could act as a buffer while healthcare staff take action this winter.  The 31-page report reveals that NHS performance is